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.

To what extent do current depictions of the Egyptian situation reproduce the simplistic narrative of the “Brotherhood” versus the “Army” as the only options worth discussing? How does this binary either illuminate Egypt’s cultural, political, and religious dynamics or obscure its more complex realities?

Our respondents are:

Margot Badran, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Senior Fellow, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University

Thanassis Cambanis, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and Fellow, The Century Foundation

Mohammad Fadel, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

Atef Said, Attorney, Researcher, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Samuli Schielke, Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orient

Jeremy F. Walton, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Religious Studies, New York University

Jessica Winegar, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University

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Margot Badran, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Senior Fellow, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University

In the recent runoff presidential elections, Egyptians were forced to choose between an Islamist as head of state (with all the old fears stirred up and further stoked by some extreme statements emanating from some Islamists) on the one hand, and yet another president of military background-cum-felool, or remnant of the old regime, on the other. It seemed like a replay of the Mubarak broken record: it’s me the protector, the strong (military-pedigreed) man of the secular state or the tyranny of an Islamist takeover. Many “ordinary” people, rather unexpectedly, voiced strong anti-Islamist fears while pricey posters, many billboard-size, of fear-mongering Shafik suddenly became ubiquitous not just in Cairo and other big cities but in rural areas as I could see while driving in the eastern Nile Delta. Islamists, meanwhile, raised specter of the return of the felool on the apron-strings of the army while breathlessly pledging allegiance to a secular state and talking togetherness. Now, four days after the announcement of Morsi as president, discourse swivels. The polarized debates that ballooned during the campaign frenzy are deflating. The secular-Islamist binary which never made “real” sense is suddenly devalued political currency, although it seems to retain life in the international exchange. Inside Egypt, from where I write, the frame is Egyptian; the concerns are social justice, jobs, a secure life, and mutual respect or more simply getting along with each other, as people are prone to do when not whipped up. The rhetoric of the new president, of public figures, and of ordinary people is noticeably the inclusive rhetoric of the revolution. Citizens are hopeful but not naïve. One builds on hope, not gloom and doom. People I meet here say, “let us see if the words of the new president, speaking of and for the whole people, translate into reality.” For most here it is not a simple zero-sum game of secular or Islamic, win or loose—that kind of thinking that Mubarak had fostered and exploited and that found new life in the runoff. It is instead a slog with eyes wide open to gain a better life in a better Egypt. If the cudgels of polarization between “secularists” and “Islamists” (increasingly meaningless categories) are now being laid down in Egypt (pace disruptive diehards), it would be helpful for all if the world outside followed suit.

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Thanassis Cambanis, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and Fellow, The Century Foundation

In the utopian early days of Egypt’s uprising, the self-declared citizens in the “Republic of Tahrir Square” imagined a new politics that would transcend the tired binary of secular despot and Islamist dissent. What they lived briefly embodied a new coalition, which could unite Nasserists and Muslim Brothers, social democrats and revolutionary socialists, Salafis and labor organizers, under a common cause: the fall of the regime and bread, freedom, and social justice.

The year and a half since then unsurprisingly has featured a power struggle among the most entrenched and best organized forces in political life. A Muslim Brother faced a felool, or “remnant” of the old regime, in the presidential runoff primarily because the Brotherhood and the old ruling party are the only parties with money, cadres, and national organizations that can run campaigns and distribute patronage.

It has become fashionable to decry the failure of revolutionary forces, or secular liberals, to organize effectively. And they have, in fact, displayed an unfortunate proclivity for fractiousness and political dullness.

Viewed from a long-term institutional perspective, however, the presidential contest makes sense as a transitional vestige of the dying old order, rather than a harbinger of the new. A shoddy, rushed transition, (mis)engineered by an intrusive military junta bent on protecting its privileges, will naturally privilege status quo players.

Yet in the short historical period since Mubarak was shunted aside, alternative political forces have appeared and already have captured a broad swath of the electorate. Consensual, liberal, and relatively secular candidates captured 51 percent of the first round presidential voting. An analysis of the parliamentary and presidential balloting suggests that Salafis, Muslim Brothers and ex-regime felool will lose political shares to nationalists, secular liberals and socialists, and less doctrinaire Islamists. Furthermore, the new parties and candidates have proved dogged at building national networks that will allow them to better compete in future elections and importantly, to develop a tangible, alternative policy agenda.

For all the reasons to despair about the final choice in the presidential runoff—Mubarak’s old false binary of the repressive state or rigid Islamists—there is plenty of reason to believe that the dream of a new politics is coming true. We’ll just have to wait many years to see it take shape.

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Mohammad Fadel, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Almost eighteen months after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi has been sworn in as Egypt’s first, democratically elected president. Few would have predicted that Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s inner circle, would ascend to this post, especially given the Brotherhood’s pronouncements at the time of Mubarak’s resignation that it was not interested in competing for the presidency. To make matters worse, the man Morsi defeated for Egypt’s top post was Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s last prime minister who openly ran on anti-revolution, law-and-order platform. Predictably, this turn of events frustrated many outside observers, as well as many Egyptian revolutionaries themselves. Indeed, some commentators continue to insist that in fact nothing has really changed in Egypt and that despite five free elections in the eighteenth months since the January 25^th Revolution, Egypt remains, essentially, a military dictatorship, albeit with the Muslim Brotherhood playing the role of junior partner. This analysis, however, is remarkably short-sighted. Egypt now has a dynamic and competitive public sphere with at least three major political groupings: Islamist revolutionaries; non-Islamist revolutionaries; and an old guard whose power is increasingly disappearing. The Islamist revolutionaries themselves are not a unitary group, nor are the non-Islamist revolutionaries. While the success of Ahmed Shafik indicates that the old guard might, in fact, be the most coherent political group in post-revolutionary Egypt, their failure to secure their man’s election in Egypt’s first competitive presidential elections proves that their monopoly on Egyptian politics has been shattered. Likewise, Morsi was only able to win because of his ability to secure votes outside of his Islamist base. The conciliatory tone Morsi has taken toward both old regime elements and non-Islamist revolutionaries, in his victory speech, speech in Tahrir Square and inaugural speech, is consistent with his (and by extension, the Muslim Brotherhood’s) recognition that Egyptian politics is inherently pluralistic. While it was always unrealistic to believe that Egyptians could wipe out a legacy of 60 years of military rule in eighteen months, they have already made great strides in destroying the superstructure of military dictatorship. Whatever control the military continues to enjoy, its influence is clearly on the wane. Likewise, while Islamist revolutionaries currently have the upper hand relative to non-Islamist revolutionaries, the gap between them is not so great that it threatens genuine pluralism.  In short, Egypt will continue to trod a path leading it to an era of ever increasing political pluralism and democratic politics. While some may be disappointed in that the first competitive presidential election in Egyptian history came down to a battle between symbols of the old regime’s political battles, one should not be surprised if, by decade’s end, Egypt’s political culture has undergone a radical makeover, and that its leading political figures then will be complete unknowns today.

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Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

According to some observers, the victory of Mohamed Morsi in the Egyptian presidential elections signals a return to the pre-revolutionary political order, one anchored in the tense but stable relation between military and Islamist forces. I think this a mistaken view. First, prior to the uprising, Islamist groups—most important among them, the Muslim Brotherhood—had not been exercising political power in Egypt, shaping state economic policies, drafting legislation, guiding Egypt in its relations with foreign nations. Rather, they were excluded from the decision-making apparatuses of the state, and were commonly targets of its repressive actions. However while the Egyptian military may continue to control and limit challenges to its power, Morsi’s election as president has to be seen as a direct result of the opening in Egypt’s political system produced through the forces of popular sovereignty mobilized on January 25th, 2011, and should be respected as such. Secondly, it’s wrong to interpret the electoral results as tantamount to the seizure of the state by the Muslim Brotherhood. By many indications, Morsi’s administration recognizes that it will have to build bridges to other political parties and constituencies if it is to have any chance of pushing back the military’s hold on power. Recent meetings between Brotherhood leaders and representatives from the campaigns of Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh and Hamdeen Sabahi, as well as the group’s announcement that it would appoint a woman, a Copt, and a youth activist as vice-presidents all point toward such a recognition.

Such steps toward coalition building suggest a very different political terrain than the one that existed prior to the revolution, and hence of political possibilities whose outcome cannot be foreseen with any certainty. Yes, the entrenched power of the military remains an ongoing threat to any transformation. But the only other stable element in Egypt’s political life today is the knee-jerk refusal of some of the old leftist and liberal political movements to see beyond the politics of the “Islamist threat.”

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

In a recent piece in the Los Angeles Times Jeffrey Fleishman described the negotiation of a power-sharing arrangement in Egypt between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. “The maneuver,” Fleishman reported, “revealed the generals’ determination to prevent a new political force from tugging the country closer to an Islamic state while threatening the army’s stature and sprawling business interests.”

Here we go again. Even before democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi had assumed power, the American media proved itself incapable of resisting the temptation to trot out the Islamist bogeyman. The notion that the victory of an MB-affiliated candidate necessarily moves Egypt closer to an “Islamic state” was one among many Mubarak-era assumptions that the revolutionaries sought to consign to the dustbin. The idea of the revolution was to open up the political field and allow new voices to be heard, including but not limited to the MB. The idea was to restore politics to Egypt. That Fleishman reports the Mubarak establishment’s storyline as fact reflects the stubborn persistence of an outdated mindset in which authoritarianism and theocracy are seen as the only alternatives for governing Middle Eastern states. The Egyptian people have rejected these positions. As Juan Cole argued last week, the recent elections revealed a diverse and pluralistic Egyptian political landscape. Politics in Egypt is alive, if not entirely well.

It is not only Mubarak who needed to be overthrown to improve this situation. It is the domestic and international power structure that supported him and continues to support active remnants of the old regime. This includes the American foreign and military establishment. An example is the State Department’s recent use of a waiver to avoid congressionally mandated democracy conditions on U.S. military assistance. Egyptians are well aware of U.S. support for the old regime, understand American ties to the SCAF, and remain wary of official American influence in Egypt. And rightly so. Mubarak may be gone, but Fleishman’s piece reminds us that his powerful legacy lives on, not only in Cairo and Washington, but in our own minds. Egyptians with different political and religious views are challenging the generals not because they want to “tug the country closer to an Islamic state,” but because they want to live with dignity in a democratic Egypt.

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Atef Said, Attorney, Researcher, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

While the results of the presidential election in Egypt seem to be reproducing the dichotomy of military vs. Islamists, the reality is more complex and fluid than this. It is important to note that we miss a lot looking only at electoral politics—and even that has been puzzling. For example, almost all the top candidates in the first round have gained votes from the far left to the far right, except for Shafik, whose votes have to be explained by wide range of reasons. Looking outside the election box, it is important to look at two crucial issues. The first is that the military/Muslim Brotherhood relation is in itself contradictory and explosive in nature. The dichotomy exists superficially, but its problematic nature makes a lot of room for all parties in Egypt to maneuver. It is contradictory and problematic because it is a kind of competition over power but is a partnership at the same time. The military, for example, has used the Muslim Brotherhood after the revolution, and has used the parliament as a way to suppress protests.

The argument here was that once you have elected bodies, protests should stop, i.e. using electoral politics rather than street politics. But at the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood is a very ambitious and difficult partner. Both parties need one another; one can be described as a real power without a political party (the Supreme Council for Armed Forces, SCAF), and the other is a political party without real power (the Muslim Brotherhood, albeit now they have limited or unclear presidential power). Neither domestic nor international atmosphere will allow for an explicit military coup today. Hence, the army will continue to find a way to work with the MB, but at the same time, keeps the military and the security apparatus away from the MB. The Muslim Brotherhood has lost lots of its popularity before the presidential election when it distanced itself from the street. And it seems to be back to flirt with the street to gain political legitimacy battling with SCAF over power.

The second reason why this dichotomy is simplistic is that it ignores the power of street politics, or what may be described as the Tahrir “party.” I mean by this those youths who vary from liberal to the far left, those who have not been channeled into strong political parties yet. In other words, street politics and protests will not stop in the near future in Egypt, and those youths, despite not being very organized in one strong political party, have the power of monitoring and pressuring both SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood and its new president. One main source of this unorganized “party’s” strength is that it holds the spirit and demands of Tahrir and the revolution. While I am writing this today, the elected president Mohamed Morsi, MB, came to Tahrir Square and took his President oath informally. While he is seeking the street support vis-à-vis SCAF, this proves the power of the revolution and the street. This third “party” is also strong because neither SCAF nor MB has an alternative vision to solve real economic problems and the social and economic justice issues that were strong motivation for the revolution. Both SCAF and MB share a similar economic vision, which is neo-liberal. There will also be real problems posed by competition in the economic sphere.

At the time of writing this, two coalitions, each of them consisting of multiple political forces and political parties, have been announced. Both are against the military and Islamist dominations of post-revolutionary Egypt. Both coalitions are calling for a civilian democratic (not religious and not military) Egypt. It is important to note that neither the Army and its security apparatus, nor the Islamists or even the Tahrir “party” are homogenous entities. The situation in Egypt is very fluid and far from settled.

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Samuli Schielke, Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orien

It is both in the interest of the Brotherhood and the Supreme Military Council to depict the struggle in Egypt as a bipolar one between the military and Islamists. This is good propaganda, but quite inaccurate. Since the constitutional referendum of March 19, 2011, there is an uncanny and uneasy alliance between the two power blocks. Morsi’s victory, aided by concessions from the Brotherhood towards the military, only makes this alliance official. The real revolutionary struggle takes place elsewhere.

The most important misconception about the Muslim Brotherhood (actively promoted by the Brotherhood itself) is that it is a revolutionary movement committed to democracy. The history of the Brotherhood has often been one of deals with the system and rarely one of a radical demand for change. As a political movement on the grass-roots level (nevermind their public discourse), the Brotherhood is authoritarian, opportunistic, and arrogant, lacking any genuine respect for its political competitors. The military, of course, is no better, determined as it is to guard its privileges at all cost. There is no reason to expect any genuine commitment to democracy, political freedom, labor rights, or gender justice by either of the two – unless they are forced to do so by a strong opposition.

The revolution failed to overthrow the state of the Free Officers (Morsi’s victory marks only an adjustment or reform of it), but it has been successful in establishing a large and vocal democratic opposition that has become a powerful political voice in large cities of northern Egypt; less so in southern Egypt and in rural areas. Although too weak and heterogeneous (and, perhaps, too principled) to gain power at the moment, they are the third power block to reckon with, and the only one committed to changing the system towards social justice and freedom.

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Jeremy F. Walton, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Religious Studies, New York University

In the wake of the Egyptian Revolution, I have frequently encountered a rather predictable set of questions: What will happen in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power? Will Egypt become “more Islamic”? (and my own favorite) Is secularism in danger? My kneejerk response to these queries is to plead relative ignorance—although my scholarship concerns the myriad relationships between the practices of Islam and those of liberal democracy in Turkey, I cannot claim to have any specific expertise on Egypt. Nevertheless, friends and acquaintances have continued to solicit me, evincing a near-fetishistic anxiety over the empowerment of a Muslim political movement in Egypt. How might a scholar of Islam, secularism, and contemporary governance address these anxieties without slipping into the Manichean language of religion vs. secularism, liberal autonomy vs. authoritarian coercion, of Islam vs. the West? Many commentators have suggested the recent history of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey offers a potential model for Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. While the center-right AKP does draw its electoral strength from a similar demographic constituency as the bedrock supporters Muslim Brotherhood—the conservative, urban petite bourgeoisie—I have already argued against making such broad-stroke comparisons that hinge only on the common religious orientation of otherwise distinct organizations and actors. Indeed, a more nuanced comparison to current condition of the Muslim Brotherhood might well be found in the post-Communist trajectory of Poland’s Solidarity Movement or the period of democratization following Franco’s rule in Spain. Like Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood at the current moment, both post-Communist Poland and post-fascist Spain witnessed the transformation of anti-establishment, counter-hegemonic political movements into legitimate, newly hegemonic, democratic actors. Unfortunately, such comparisons between the Muslim Brotherhood and non-Muslim political actors and contexts are both rare and difficult to put forward. I suspect that the reason for this difficulty has to do with the immense power of the adjectives “Muslim” and “Islamic” in Euro-American political discourse. Within this discourse, “Muslim” as a political adjective connotes a single, problematic relationship to both the systems of democratic governance and a democratic ethos. As long as such an essentialist political connotation of the term “Muslim” perseveres, a multifaceted analysis of the relationship between Islam and any political context, Egyptian or otherwise, remains immensely difficult to achieve.

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Jessica Winegar, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University

As the election commission waded through the votes to decide who had won the Egyptian presidential election, the leftist Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabahi from the previous round was on the `umra pilgrimage to Mecca. Perhaps it was bad timing on Sabbahi’s part to be away from the country at a time of negotiations among revolutionary forces. Yet his surprising success in the polls (capturing 21.5% of the vote) and his religious trip are but one indicator among many that the secular army/religious divide presented by the U.S. media does not fully capture the complexity of Egyptians’ relationships to the military, religion, and politics. The results of the first round of elections, with the general’s candidate and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidate on top, certainly reflect Nasser’s creation of a militarized state and suppression of the MB. At the same time, the candidate most faithful to the Nasserist tradition openly criticized the army, left the country at a crucial moment for religious reasons, and sent members of his party to meet with both Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, and Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh, the centrist Islamist and former MB member who captured 19% of the vote.

Although many self-described secularists and Islamists in Egypt join US media pundits in presenting a binary view of Egypt’s political choices, the situation on the ground is much more complex and constantly changing. In the first round, the majority of voters (taken as a collective) chose candidates other than the army man Ahmed Shafik and the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsi. Divisions within the MB (and within Islamist groups in general) that are marked by geography, gender, and generation belie any attempt to generalize; divisions within the army are also revealing themselves in the process. Furthermore, perhaps the most serious issue obscured by the binary is that the MB and the army are arguably not that different in terms of their approach to economic policy and in their urban, often upper middle class biases towards social betterment. To reproduce the binary is indeed to fall into a trap set long ago, perfected by the Mubarak regime, and, time may tell, continued by collusion (intended or not) between the army and the new president. One hopes that the complexity and diversity of Egyptian political life after Mubarak will open new possibilities for overcoming these divides.

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To think that organized religions make a complete claim to the sacred—that is, claims title to all that is sacred—is to confuse legal categories with political phenomenology. It is an accident of history that the struggle of the state to free itself of the church was framed not as a conflict of faiths but as a conflict over the place of faith in the organization of political power. In part, this was a consequence of organized religion’s tendency to side with conservative political forces. In part, it was because these political revolutions began two hundred years after the Reformation, which did indeed use the language of the sacred against the established Church. When modern revolutionaries took up the task of translating the felt meaning of political revolution into a constitutional order of law, they thought of themselves as men of the Enlightenment using the language of reason to push religion out of the public sphere. This hardly means that they neither experienced nor relied upon the sacred. In Arendt’s classic analysis, they began by demanding legal rights but ended with an experience of the absolute character of public action. Rights as a means to private ends became a lesser theme to the experience of a kind of transcendent meaning in and through political engagement. In a crisis, it remains true today that the secular state does not hesitate to speak of sacrifice, patriotism, nationalism, and homeland in the language of the sacred. The state’s territory becomes consecrated ground, its history a sacred duty to maintain, its flag something to die for. None of this has much to do with the secular; these are matters of faith, not reason.

The great separation of church and state was intended to place religion squarely within the private domain, outside of the public order of the state. Some supported this position on the grounds that it was good for faith, others on the grounds that it was good for the state, and some on both grounds. Some of our most troubling issues today arise from the crossing of this line of separation, for example, debates over the legal status of abortion or of gay marriage. These debates show us the porousness of the line, for the values we bring to public debate will inevitably reflect our basic beliefs about what it is we owe each other. Those beliefs come from all of our experience, including the ethical practices of our religious faiths. Such tensions are something we all understand. Coming from a religious tradition of monotheism, however, it is much harder to understand a multiplicity of forms of the sacred. Indeed, to speak the language of the sacred about the state suggests not just a violation of the public/private divide, but to many it also suggests a practice of idolatry. Both the religious person and the secularist may agree that they want no gods in the public space: the former because there is only one god, the latter because there are no gods.

Political theology recognizes a multiplicity of forms of the sacred. If sovereignty is grounded in sacrifice, then public life is as much about the realization of a transcendent truth of the self as it is about the maintenance of a just legal order. Political theology, unsurprisingly, has no place in the liberal conception of the state, which begins with Lilla’s great separation not as a historical fact but as a philosophical premise. This difference at the level of theory, however, does not necessarily produce any tension between political theology and the political practices of liberalism. If the political order maintains both an idea of the sacred and an idea of justice, of sovereignty and law, then the point of political theology is not to undermine a particular concept of justice but to expand the horizon within which we understand the operation of the political imagination. Liberal politics may strive to achieve a defensible idea of justice, even as liberal theory fails as an explanation of the source and character of political experience.

The interesting way in which Schmitt was against liberalism had nothing to do with his personal political beliefs and practices, which were indeed antiliberal. Rather, his theory of the political denies the fundamental premises of liberal political theory. This is an argument over the nature of political experience, not over what we should or should not do within the polity. Although Schmitt may not have thought so, one can be liberal in one’s personal political values and practices and still think that we need a theological account of political experience. This is no more difficult than practicing a politics of liberalism while recognizing the importance of revolution to the normative—and historical—foundation of the state. There is nothing liberal about revolution. The relationships at stake here are the political form of that which appears to the individual as the relationship of love to justice. The objects of our love do not earn our affection because they are just, but that does not make us indifferent to justice. We love our children and, therefore, we want them to be just. But we do not abandon our love if they act unjustly.

If we view politics through the lens of contemporary, liberal theory, we will misapprehend the nature of political experience and the meanings that citizens realize in and through their political identities. Elements of political experience grounded in faith and sacrifice will be ignored. We will always be surprised by the violence of which the state—even the liberal state—is capable. Liberalism as a theory of the political fails when political practice turns to killing and being killed, whether that violence is turned inward in the form of revolution or outward in the form of war. We will dismiss the high political rhetoric of sacrifice as dangerous, because it is unreasonable. But only according to liberal theory must the state be a “reasonable” enterprise. Political theology reminds us that apart from reason there remains faith—dangerous as that might be.

Political theology, as I pursue it here, is a project of descriptive political analysis. We are well past the era in which theology could draw upon reason to support the sacred. Indeed, that separation of reason from revelation may be a more important “great separation” than that of which Lilla writes. We will not be convinced by any logical arguments for the existence of God, whether the god of politics or that of religion. Theological inquiry today can only be a practice of phenomenology: to identify and describe the presence of the sacred, wherever it appears.

Political theology gains its critical edge when we juxtapose the products of that phenomenological inquiry to the constructions of liberal political theory. At stake is our understanding of the social imaginary by which we frame our world. There is nothing wrong with setting oneself against the values that are revealed in this account. We are not bound to our political experience as we are bound to the experience of the senses. Understanding the power of the nation does not make me a willing recruit. But unless one begins with an understanding of the character of the social imaginary, one’s oppositional political practices are likely simply to miss their targets. Just as no one will be convinced by argument to believe in God, no faith was ever defeated by argument alone. The ground of faith is in the experience of the sacred, and this works quite independently of reason.

Political theology today is best thought of as an effort to describe the social imaginary of the political. It proceeds at the intersection of constitutional law, cultural anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The inquiry is not to take us back to premodern forms of religious influence on political order, but to the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. Political theology argues that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.

By describing his work as theological, Schmitt suggests that the stakes involved are existential and phenomenological. Meaning, not efficiency—experience, not justice—is the issue. While he would no doubt vigorously object to the comparison, he is in some respects not so distant from that other existential explorer of the soul, Sigmund Freud. Both saw a culture desperately looking for possible sources of meaning in the face of a modern crisis of faith. Both doubted the capacity of reason to exhaust the sources of meaning that structure a human life. Schmitt, the constitutional lawyer, differed not so much in his concerns, as in the direction of his inquiry. For him, it was not the individual soul but the soul of the polity—of man in his political, rather than his psychological, aspect—that was the object of inquiry.

Schmitt’s work invites us to develop a political theology for our time. We must pierce the state’s self-presentation as an efficient means of justly advancing individual welfare and look to the experience of the political. Metaphorically, when we put the modern state on the couch, we find a social organism that is simultaneously deeply in fear of its own death (the existential crisis) and in deep denial of the fact that it is willing to do anything at all to put off that death (liberal theory). Looking into the soul of the modern welfare state, we can still see the mysterium tremendum of the sacred, with its tremendous power for both destruction and construction.

This work must be responsive to the particular conditions of an American superpower that simultaneously asks its young people to take up the political burden of sacrifice in the war on terror and seeks to affirm its belief in the rule of law. Many of our deepest conflicts—practically and conceptually—emerge out of this double commitment to a practice of political sacrifice and a practice of law. A sense that something has gone awry was expressed in the repeated critique that the Bush Administration did not ask the nation as a whole to take up the burden of sacrifice. We simultaneously condemned the war in Iraq as mistaken but felt that we should all be sacrificing more for the larger war on terrorism. Dissatisfied as we may be with that war, the problem is not that the nation will no longer respond to a call for sacrifice.

While liberal theory has given us tools to understand the rule of law, it has pushed out of sight the meaning of political sacrifice. To understand the latter, we must turn to something like Schmitt’s ideas of exception and decision. If we imagine the decision as the result of a logical deduction, we will never leave law and liberal theory. The decision that is the act of giving up the self is never the result of logic. It is an existential choice to be—or literally not to be. We can study liberal political theory a very long time and never find this existential moment of self-sacrifice. We can turn from theory to law and still not see the plainest facts of our political life. If politics remains even in part a practice of sacrifice, then we must follow Schmitt into the domain of the theological.

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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.

Nonetheless, in an attempt to respond to the sublime sentiment of watching an entire people erupt in a collective desire for self-determination, which is, moreover, actualized in the very means of conducting and realizing this desire, I feel a personal exigency to articulate certain elementary observations on what I perceive to be the worldwide consequences of these alterations. I do so in the spirit, not of analysis, but of speculation, and with the self-conscious risk of being an amateur observer.

My overall sense is that this is a revolution that has already transformed the terms with which, up to now, we have conceptualized revolution. Even if, as has been said repeatedly, one can connect the manner of the Egyptian revolution to what led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and thereby the Soviet world, the present event—which, I repeat, is still taking place—transcends the events of 1989. And this, because it does not remain tied merely to the demand for political freedom, but demands in addition the full reconfiguration of society, the creation of new institutions (political and social), and the actualization of social justice and isonomy. Whether these will be achieved is unclear. But the demand for them and the self-authorized way in which this demand was articulated is revolutionary in itself and cannot be effaced.

Moreover, since this revolution is taking place in the Arab world, and in a primarily Muslim society, the range of its consequences overcomes its strict geographical boundaries, which are, in any case, plural and overlapping (Middle East, North Africa, Southeastern Mediterranean), broaching, indeed, worldwide dimensions, all the more because simultaneously it deauthorizes the previous model of Islamic revolution in Iran.

Two things to be said here:

First: It is impossible at this moment to judge the magnitude of significance these events will have for the self-determination of every single Arab person, wherever s/he happens to reside on the planet. The revolution in Egypt and Tunisia means the reawakening of the Arab world in general and against an increasingly powerless (in world terms) Arab elite. Whatever the outcome, the rupture with the past century that saw the shift from colonization to national independence—indeed, a century of continuous dependence—is unbridgeable and irreversible. All Arabs now know—and those who still govern them know it too, but with fear—what autonomy really means: what it means to demand, unhesitant and unafraid, and to achieve, as a society en masse, the right to decide your own present and your own future. For the Arab world—and hence for all its enemies—these events testify to a foundational reconfiguration of the geopolitical dynamic, whose consequences may still be indeterminate but are most definitely subversive. The re-awakening of the sense of Arab self-determination and the demands that it poses cannot be blanketed in the language of ethno-nationalism, because it is a political action that cuts to the core of the most existential demand.

The celebration with which ordinary Arabs, in the streets and in their homes all over the world, welcomed the announcement of Mubarak’s political demise on February 11, 2011, is an indelible indication of a personalized, existential sense of awakening. But the regional reconfiguration reaches beyond the Arab world as such. One might say that, in a Mediterranean context, the catalytic event took place in December 2008, when Greek youth, responding to a case of public police brutality, and using exactly the same technological modes of communication and organization, rebelled against the state with unprecedented rage, even if this action, as radical as it was, remained inadequate in its constituent dimensions. I note that, in those days, Arab youth hailed the Greek rebellion in various blogs as an example to be followed. On the other side, temporally speaking, the recent mass protest action in Italy, spearheaded by women, against the Berlusconi government cannot possibly be disconnected from the impact that images from Egyptian streets had on the imagination of the protesters, even if this would be difficult to quantify. That these actions remain incomplete (and perhaps inadequate) speaks more to the disempowerment of European societies (even the two most politicized ones) versus Arab ones than an entrenchment of unalterable institutions.

Second: Historical coincidence is always ironic, because it can never be deliberately produced, and because, when one event shadows another, all precedent meaning is thrown off kilter. This is especially the case here, where the collapse of the Mubarak regime happens to coincide to the day with the thirty-second anniversary of the collapse of the Pahlavi regime, as a result of a revolution that led to the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Feb. 11, 1979). This coincidence signifies in essence the historically actualized disengagement of two otherwise incompatible names, because the revolutionary movement for democracy in both Egypt and Tunisia never gestured toward any religious authorization. Even the instances of collective prayer in Tahrir Square before projected mass actions remained in the realm of a social, not political, practice. Sublime remains, above all, the image of Egyptian Christians forming a human chain of protection around Muslims in prayer against possible attacks by thugs of the secret police. (The gesture, I was told, was reversed when Muslims stood guard outside a Coptic church during mass.) Against all talk by fear-mongering pundits from quarters that wish to denigrate Egypt’s achievement, the Muslim Brotherhood explicitly articulated its support from the outset for a real—therefore, secular—democracy.

Let us not mince words in the face of sublime events. The Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings are the epitome of secular action—which is not to say, secularist. Whatever will be the ultimate expression of the movement’s constituent power—and, at present, this is still profoundly unknown, and all bets are off—the constitution of the action itself, in terms of both the intention and the execution of the actors day after day, unfolded with a univocal concentration on self-determination extraneous to any external, transcendental, authorization. Moreover, the fact that a world-historical secular event is taking place in Muslim society—and especially insofar as it goes against the legacy of the Iranian Revolution—registers as a powerful indication of how inadequate has been the haste among pundits and academics to proclaim the advent of a post-secular age. Although this is a broader issue pertaining to the general politics of the “post-”—which testifies ultimately to a generally inadequate intellectual response to the emergent—it deserves to be underlined as a point of departure for some urgent reconsiderations.

Finally: The dominant Orientalism that wants every resistance to power in Muslim societies to be an expression of religious fanaticism and terrorism was dealt a brutal blow in just eighteen days. We are speaking of eighteen days of explosive popular action that interwove a technologically ingenious urban youth; a deeply entrenched workers’ syndicalist movement; the initiative of independent women in and out of the family structure; the liberal bourgeoisie of the main Egyptian cities; the well-trained organization of the Muslim Brotherhood among key professions (especially doctors); the explicit participation of people working in the judicial system (including judges wearing, as signs, their court regalia); and, above all, the spontaneously and autonomously enraged association of tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor. Let us not forget that the spark for this revolutionary rage was struck by a food-vendor’s act of self-immolation on a Tunis street.

In Egypt and Tunisia, we see the very idea of revolution being transformed before our eyes, yet simultaneously connecting itself with its elemental and integral significance. Revolution no longer means the violent overthrow of a political regime in an orchestrated (or hijacked) action, under the command of a revolutionary vanguard, secular or religious—an action that inevitably leads to a civil war that never ends for the generations who experience it and indelibly marks the generations that follow it. Revolution now means what it has always meant in essence: the people’s removal of their consent to power.

For, in the last instance, no regime can continue to exist without the consent of the society it reigns over, whether this consent is conscious or unconscious, willful or coerced, driven by interest or driven by fear. The great Etienne de La Boétie first spoke of voluntary servitude in 1549, simultaneously directing our attention to the fact that it only takes the many to realize they hold more power than the One who nominally controls them. La Boétie’s calling continues to be utterly apt to the contemporary situation, where the world’s ubiquitous oligarchies, which trade in the name of democracy, sustain themselves with the profound collaboration of a demos that disavows its responsibility for self-determination and self-governance.

I understand that many would say that it’s much too early to tell. And, even more, mere withdrawal of consent is inadequate without the move to constituent power. Strictly speaking, this is true: withdrawal of consent to heteronomous power (a negative action) must be followed by constituent action of autonomous power (a positive action) for democracy to be fully enacted as a regime (kratos). However, without the first, nothing happens at all. And, indeed, the first moment—withdrawal of consent to power—is, in itself (in its negativity), autonomous action.

Much has been written, from within the Arab world, about the complexity of alliances and intersections that played a role in the process of this spontaneous revolution. I isolate especially two articles by Paul Amar in Jadaliyya: “Why Mubarak is Out,” on February 1, and “Why Egypt’s Progressives Win,” on February 8. I also note Mona El-Ghobashy’s account of Egyptian political structure in the panel “Egypt Arising” that took place at Columbia University on February 9. Every presentation on this panel (El-Ghobashy, Juan Cole, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Rashid Khalidi) was right on the mark, but Filiu’s focus on the new political culture of avowed ex-jihadists in Egypt deserves further exploration and discussion.

There is a last instance, of course, in hard social-historical terms. No doubt, capitalism’s worldwide economic crisis and the wound it inflicted on the poorest strata of Egyptian and Tunisian society drew the bottom line of forbearance and was the catalyst that dissolved and streamlined the sedimented desperation of generations. And this too was conducted and guided through a well honed and organized workers’ movement with a profound history of strike action behind it, whose articulated (and utterly realizable) threat of a general strike that would include Suez Canal workers—in what, we must admit, was an uncanny historical realization of the Sorelian myth—was what ultimately precipitated Mubarak’s final demise. Beyond all this, however, let us remember that one of the demands that became a chant on the lips of the multitude was karama: dignity. This demand has already been met, no matter what may ensue, by the revolution itself, by the dignity of this revolution.

Condition: normal?

I flew to Egypt on January 31, 2011, instead of going for holiday in Finland, where I had hoped to work on an article that was to be named in reference to the experience of a friend working as health inspector in northern Egypt. The inspector’s team’s work consisted of going to a state-subsidised bakery once a day, passing in front of the queue, collecting a pile of bread, and signing in the inspection book: “Condition: normal.” My friend pointed out that this doesn’t say whether the condition is good or not, only that it is the way it is. In the article, I wanted to write about this demoralizing experience: finding lofty promises of development and progress surrounded by a mash of nepotism and corruption, and high aspirations of personal advancement countered by repeated frustration.  In the past couple of years, I have become rather critical of the Foucauldian approach of looking at religion, morality, government, secularity, etc. from the point of view of governmentality and subjectivation, because I have sensed that these approaches do not explain how it is to live under the conditions they describe. In the article I was going to write, I wanted to develop a more phenomenological approach to great expectations and grand schemes, looking at everyday tactics of evasion that people undertake to find a minimal degree of human dignity in a world that denies them that. This was a tragic undertaking, I wanted to argue, because it was those very tactics of evasion that, at the same time, constituted the system of corruption, nepotism, and shady businesses they tried to evade.

I was wrong. Suddenly and surprisingly—not only to foreign observers but also to Egyptians themselves—a vast part of the population has gone out to the streets and claimed their human dignity by demanding that the entire “system” (nizam) be replaced. What I had not taken into account was that the demoralzing experience of being forced to become a part of the corrupt system of relationships in order to survive its pressure, had become the breeding ground of a growing sense of anger and an urgent desire to live in a different world—a sense that only needed the successful revolution of Tunisia as an example to find that, rather than coping with the condition of normality, it is, after all, possible to change that condition.

That said, I continue to think that the Foucauldian fashion of studying power is inadequate to understand the revolutionary spirit. Revolution is certainly a matter of affect, but it cannot be understood by means of subjectivation, cultivation, governmentality, or any other approach that highlights the discursive and the strategic. As I have experienced it in Egypt, and as it has been told to me by people who participated in it, revolution is an emotional state, a sensibility of being that is marked by a peculiar shift in the relationship of imagination and action, and by a transient state of exception that stands in an open relationship with the persistence of political and social transformation. In the limited space of this essay, I will try to make some sense of these two points before I attempt a preliminary conclusion about the relationship of power, normality, and revolution.

“This is more than I could have ever dreamed of.”

People I spoke with in Egypt kept highlighting to me the way they themselves had been surprised by the events. Some told me that they had gone to demonstrate on January 25 but did not expect anybody else to show up. Several times, people have expected that the revolution would lose its momentum and that people would become tired and give up, only to be happily surprised by huge new crowds of demonstrators filling the cities’ streets. With growing trust in the possibility of changing things, the demands of the demonstrators have rapidly increased in scope: from asking Mubarak (and his son) not to run in the next elections, they have moved on to demanding his resignation, and now they want to put him on trial. The success of doing something they themselves had been utterly sceptical about just the previous day has given them an immense sense of pride, dignity, and trust in their capacity to change the world. This is the original revolutionary moment: the birth of a sense that something to date unimaginable is in the process of being realized. This stands in a striking contrast to the experience of normality, in which great expectations and promises—be they political, religious, economical, or moral—are always far ahead of a frustrating and demoralizing reality. If, in the condition of normality, reality systematically falls short of imagination, in the condition of revolution, action exceeds the imagined and creates unexpected new grounds of expectation. The revolutionary condition changes the world, not because it would change the logic of governmentality, the relationships of power, or the technologies of subject-making (although that will be necessary in the further course of the revolution), but because it in itself is a change of the subjective life-world of the people involved: an emotional reassessment of the situation, a new way of being in the world.

This is the starting point. But the question, of course, is how permanent this change will be. Right now it looks like the Egyptian revolution is going to be a long one, but one day, it will be over, for better or worse. The question, then, is what the revolutionary condition does to the condition of normality.

Transience and persistence

As an anthropologist who has long worked on festive culture, I have noticed a strikingly festive aspect to the revolutionary space of Tahrir Square. What is taking place there is not just a protest against an oppressive regime and the expression of a demand for freedom. In itself, it is freedom. It is a real, actual, lived moment of the freedom and dignity that the pro-democracy movement demands. As such, this is an ambiguous moment, because its stark sense of unity (there is a consensus as to having absolutely no party slogans on the square) and power is bound to be transient, for, even in the most successful scenario, it will be followed by a long period of political transition, tactics, negotiations, party politics—all kinds of business that will not be anything like that moment of standing together and finally daring to say “no!” But thanks to its utopian nature, it is also indestructible. Once it has been realized, it cannot be wiped out of people’s minds again. It is an experience that, with different colorings and from different perspectives, will mark an entire generation.

A revolution is not a quick business; it requires persistence. And there are different kinds of persistent effects that this moment can have. Those regarding the political system and its entrenchment with the economic system are critical, and they have not yet been realized. They will be the subject of an ongoing struggle. Others, more psychological and affective ones, are already becoming part of a new normality. A particularly interesting one, because it is currently so intensively debated among Egyptian intellectuals, has to do with the figure of the father-president. On February 4, the vice president Omar Suleiman declared that Egyptians had to show respect to the president, because “Mubarak is our father.” In other words, Suleiman took recourse to a social ideology of patriarchal rule, where the father is to be respected even in disagreement. It is a shrewd attempt to employ some deeply rooted sentiments among the people, but meanwhile the sentiments of many Egyptians have changed in a strikingly Oedipal manner. Characteristically, one of the democracy activists replied in a media interview: “My father is dead.” Many intellectuals now argue that this revolution is really a Freudian father-murder par excellence. By symbolically killing the authoritarian father of the nation, they argue, Egyptians are gaining their independence as full persons.

Preliminary conclusions

The degree of success of the Egyptian revolution is still undecided as I write these lines. The situation is critical, and Egyptians are probably facing a long struggle ahead. Whatever the shape of the new normality that will emerge from the revolution, one thing is already certain: The generation of Egyptians who participate in this revolution can never again be governed the way they once were. Their experience of acting and changing their condition, the success of going out to the streets at all on January 25, of throwing back the police on January 28, of establishing law and order in the absence of the police after the lootings of January 29, of organizing mass peaceful demonstrations and putting the entire political system under pressure, has changed the way they understand their scope of possible action. Any attempt to govern them, be it by a democratic government or by the authoritarian system consolidating itself again, has to take this into account.

This leads me to a preliminary theoretical conclusion. Michel Foucault famously argued that his way of thinking about power by no means excludes resistance, but that every form of power produces its own particular form of resistance. Both the normality of the past years and the revolution that began on January 25 compel me to turn this idea around. Before the revolution, the “system” actually consisted largely of the people’s attempts to endure it, which gave it its particularly wicked and demoralising form. As the revolution continues, the “system,” which Egyptians now want to overthrow, is being hastily adjusted by the regime in reaction to a spontaneous mass movement that keeps surprising the ruling elite. After the revolution, new ways to govern the country will emerge, for better or worse. In reversal of Foucault’s thesis, the Egyptian revolution shows that every form of resistance produces its own particular form of power.