The More Things Change the More They Remain the Same

Near the start of what was called the Arab Spring the people of Egypt witnessed the removal of their President and Evil Dictator Mubarak and awaited what were to be real free elections for a new President and for Egyptian Hope and Change. The election did not exactly prove to produce the liberating governance the Egyptians had so hoped for. The result in Egypt and throughout the countries which were initiating or striving to initiate change now faced what had been renamed the Arab Winter. The results did not quite measure up and fulfill the Hopes for Change that had driven the initial uprisings. Now Egypt is experiencing buyers’ remorse or is it reMorsi. They have come to the realization that the new boss is not all that different than the old boss; he simply has a slightly different dogma which results in the exact same practices. The protesters are still being shot and murdered. Those arrested still face torture and people still simply disappear. But the people of Egypt are going to find that their new oppressors are far more difficult to remove than was Mubarak as the new oppressions have the backing and support of Allah.

Having the professed support and direction of Allah and the religious class of Imams means you are facing forces who can define all who oppose them to be apostates.  Once any group has been labeled as apostates they become enemies of Allah. Once they become enemies of Allah they can also become the target of Jihad. Once you have become a target of Jihad you then can face a Fatwa used as a death sentence that frees the hands of the believers to bring you to justice, the justice of final judgment of the grave. This provides President Morsi with his backing of the Muslim Brotherhood legitimacy far greater and more dangerous than Mubarak could ever have claimed. Mubarak could only claim the legitimacy of the State, the same claim that could be made by the people who were calling for the overthrow of the tyrant Mubarak. Morsi can claim the legitimacy of Allah with the literal blessings of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Imams and thus has legitimacy beyond that the demonstrators can ever hope to claim. Morsi can claim that he is performing the will of Allah which makes any opposition to his will an act of blasphemy which can often result in death. This will make Morsi that much more difficult to replace, and even should such be accomplished, would the next leader chosen by either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists be any improvement? Very likely they would be as bad if not worse.

The pro-democracy supporters, tempted to call them dreamers as they have little tangible power, might have had an opportunity to pull Morsi from taking power very early after he assumed the Presidency. That is no longer the case as Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood made some shrewd maneuvers rather quickly after assuming power. They revamped the top brass in the Egyptian Military retiring many of the Generals and other senior officers replacing them with members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They also promoted replacements who were also members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had managed to infiltrate the military while Mubarak was in power. Now Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood hold all the levers of power as they have replaced the necessary people in the state police and other enforcement arms of the government cementing their rule. Egypt will continue to appear to be a democratic country but in reality the winning candidates will be chosen by the Muslim Brotherhood. In many ways it is a real shame that the Egyptian people who were the original protesters were not the ones who had the organization and the funds to run and win the national elections they deserved after they had given the initial impetus for change. Now they have received change, received change but not hope.

The really sad part of the story of the Arab Spring turned Winter is that the current forces throughout the Middle East and the Arab and Muslim Worlds will lead every country which is able to forge change and will be more likely than not to end up going from their nationalist rule to theocratic Islamic rule. Even Turkey which had been organized by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to be a guarded sectarian democracy where the military was charged by the Constitution of Turkey to enforce the country’s secular nature and to remove and call for new election should Islamists ever try to compromise the modern secular nature of the country. Unfortunately, the blindness and ignorance of the European Union and its individual nations along with the United States under President Bush with advice given by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded the Turkish military stand down at the crucial point at which Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan crossed over the point of no return in his implementation of plans to alter Turkey from a secular state to one based on Sharia. The main reasons behind this reality is that the majority of the population of these countries were raised completely on Islam and either in isolation from the Western World or with an animosity for the Western World as they had a resentment of being colonized after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Western influences have had an effect on the youth in many of these countries but there are also a significant sector among the youth who are strict Islamic adherents which serves as a further reason for the overwhelming influence and power held by the Muslim Brotherhood. If Western culture and secular science based civilization manages to survive for another century, then the Islamic world may experience a reformation which will allow for a separation between Mosque and Government. If such is not the case, I do not even pretend to be able to predict what would follow. My hope is that should Islam become the dominant force on Earth they would progress forward with a rebirth of the early writings from the Mecca Koran coming into prominence. That could allow for a pluralistic society with freedom if not quite complete equality for all peoples, even non-Muslims. The coming years are going to be a crucial period where much will be held in judgment and the progress of all mankind will be in the balance. The next century will either usher in an age of unlimited brightness and discoveries or darkness where war, pestilence, and hatreds rule the earth, the seas, the skies, and the hearts of mankind.

Beyond the Cusp

What Will the Future Bring in Egypt?

Egypt is once again on the cusp of a civil war, one that will never be permitted to be fully born. What we have been witnessing over the past days has been the last gasps of the democracy movement in Egypt. The demonstrations were likely used by the government and the Muslim Brotherhood to identify who are the newest leaders who oppose the power-grab by President Morsi and the coming Islamist Constitution which will establish Sharia as the basis for all law in the new Egypt. After a few days of allowing the opposition of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood free reign. We then witnessed the release of the Muslim Brotherhood enforcers who were cast as simply being President Morsi supporters. Things in Egypt will be kept from boiling over while the voting for ratification of the new Constitution is carried out. Once the Constitution has been validated by the people of Egypt, which is a given despite what some correspondents have claimed in the West, and once the Constitution is validated we will see the full force of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood utterly close down any demonstrations against either President Morsi or the Constitution. Egypt will soon be the Sunni version of Iran with the Muslim Brotherhood providing the religious oversight of the country and those who will make up the government.

One mitigating factor is the literacy rate within the Egyptian population. The CIA Factbook reports for 2010 the literacy rate for the total population over age ten is 72% while for the male population it is 80.3% and the female population it is 63.5%. The lower the literacy rate the higher the influence of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists. This likely is an indicator that over one out of every four voters will be voting most likely exactly as his Imam will tell him to vote. Combine this with the organization and large membership and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood will likely prove more than sufficient to have the Constitution as proposed validated in the vote. This will make a basically Muslim Brotherhood written Constitution the law of the land in Egypt as the majority of the democracy delegates and Coptic Christian delegates resigned from the committee claiming they were being closed out and not allowed input to the process. This left them with absolutely no input or influence and is why the Egyptian Constitution will enforce Sharia though not immediately directly. With time Sharia will be stepped up one step at a time until Egypt will have become a Sharia State with little to no rights for anybody other than the Sunni Muslims.

This new set of developments has led to exactly what we and other pessimists had predicted would be the result of the Arab Winter transformation across numerous Arab countries. We have also seen a similar result in Tunisia which is again having riots and demonstrations as the government continues to slowly enforce Sharia based laws. This is also what will replace President Assad in Syria once he has been removed from power. The actual truth is that all of the revolutions, which so many western reporters and experts predicted would result in the flowering of democracies across the Arab World, are simply replacing secular dictators with Sharia based Theological dictatorships which will rule with harsher oppression than the governments they overthrew. Put plainly, the revolutions were hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood with assistance by the Salafists who would prefer even more strict forms of Sharia. The real problem is that the change to Sharia, Muslim Brotherhood governance is far from over and will continue to spread and will not be finished until Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) have had their monarchs replaced by Muslim Brotherhood leadership and Sharia. In time historians will look back and ask, “What were they thinking?” Unfortunately, I doubt they will be able to fathom an answer to their query.

Beyond the Cusp

Will Egypt be the Next Syria?

There is a rumbling starting in Egypt and it is centered on Egyptian President Morsi and his declaration making himself the all-powerful leader standing above the courts, the parliament, the constitutional committee as well as the sole judge, jury and executioner over any who may choose to oppose his vestment of supreme power in himself. This has sparked demonstrations on three separate fronts across Egypt. The pro-democracy forces are rising up with a unified voice claiming the high moral ground and the right to claim they had predicted such would be the end result should the Muslim Brotherhood be allowed to rise to power in Egypt. Then there are the Muslim Brotherhood and those who fully support Morsi and see a theocracy based on the principles of the Koran as interpreted through the Muslim Brotherhood as a government sent and approved by Allah to lead Egypt into its glorious future. And finally there are the Salafists who still believe that they should have won, some even claim they were robbed of victory through voting fraud and other election irregularities, and that their piety makes them not only uniquely suited to lead Egypt, but destined to rule Egypt and the World. These are but the most obvious of groups as there are likely numerous smaller factions as well as the non-Muslim groups which include the Coptic Christians among other groups. The demonstrations that have broken out in Egypt from time to time since the end of the elections are about to rise to a new and more active level as the Muslim Brotherhood attempts to cement their control for all time going forward and every other interest and political group reacts adversely and opposes every step taken by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Where we may see many strange and awkward mergers between groups that previously were seen as opposed to each other, there will likely be one central division between the groups putting them into two distinct groups, the secular and non-Muslim who will push for a separation between the government and any religion, especially Islam; and the Salafists and other extremist Muslims who honestly believe that Sharia Law should be the law of the land in Egypt with absolutely no separation between the religious leadership and the government. This sector of the Egyptian public are seeking an Iranian style theocracy with the rights of Dhimmitude applied to all non-Muslims and heresy laws invoked against any born Muslims who have left the faith and everything else one has heard about inside Iran or discussed theoretically about an Islamic Sharia State. Should these groups continue in the upcoming weeks to strengthen and increase in numbers that participate in the demonstrations, we can expect some rough times ahead as the Muslim Brotherhood controlled government attempts to enforce their will and blunt the demonstrators’ influences. One might advise the Muslim Brotherhood and their Peace and Justice Party and President Morsi and his government to attempt to keep a lid on the demonstrations and to go to any lengths to avoid allowing any demonstration to become violent. Should demonstration turn violent, then it is possible that the military will overstep as Morsi and his advisors have replaced much of the hierarchy in the military with their own people despite their not having the experience and knowledge base to make sensitive and possibly delicate military decisions. These deficiencies could backfire and lead to a new open revolution and turn Egypt into another multi-facetted civil war resembling the gnarled mess in Syria or the diffused tribal rivalries which are tearing at Libya. The truth is that the revolutionary period in Egypt may not be complete and may have simply experienced a lull and has now been retriggered by President Morsi’s overreaching power grab.

What this would mean for the rest of the world will depend on which group emerges as the final victor. If we had to predict a winner, we would place our bets on the Muslim Brotherhood holding on to power and defeating any challenges that may spring up at this time. The Muslim Brotherhood will easily defeat the secular democracy youth whose vision’s time has not yet arrived. On the other end, the Salafists might be able to be co-opted to supporting the Muslim Brotherhood rule for a period of time but will eventually hit a bump in the road where the Muslim Brotherhood will be perceived as being insufficiently Muslim and they will once again be at odds. The one promise is that eventually human rights and the democratic norms of the West will win out in the end. The Muslim World has already experienced being part of empire under the Ottoman Empire which eventually dissolved as the empire became outdated and became too weak to resist the forces of modernity. Much of the Muslim World went through a period of colonialism where they were colonized by the Europeans. This too was less than satisfactory and also collapsed. Many then experienced secular national socialist dictatorships. These governances were either aligned initially with Nazi Germany or with the Soviet Union. These were torn asunder by corruption and left much to be desired by the vast majority of the people. The Muslim World has almost run the entire gauntlet of governmental options other than a democratic republic and has just a few more options to go. We expect that the Muslim World will try any and every option before finally surrendering to a government based on individual rights, mutual respect, freedoms and liberty. The next step though, is to attempt religiously based governance, a theocracy as is ruling in Iran and rapidly taking the fore in Turkey and Egypt. We will likely also witness such governance be the next stable governance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen, to name the countries currently in flux. What we need to watch for is the next series of governments which will likely be targeted to be replaced with strict theocratic governance. The next likely country, which is already showing signs of distress, is Jordan. Once the Jordanian Monarchy has been toppled, then the rest of the dominoes will start to teeter and trip, one into the next leading to the final and most prized domino, Saudi Arabia. The intermediary dominoes are Bahrain, UAE (United Arab Emirates), Oman, Qatar, and last but not least, Kuwait. The real question is whether or not the world can hold together throughout the entire length of these transformations. Despite how much control the major powers will try to impose on this process, they will actually be rather helpless observers holding on for the ride. The main aim of the rest of the world will hopefully be to assist in making these transformations go as quickly as possible while also containing them within the Muslim World. Should they break out into the world in general, as they appear to be attempting to accomplish currently, then the process will slow and the end result could be in question if the process comes to a premature halt. The halting of the progression towards governance of freedom, equality and liberty will result in dire consequences and likely end in an unparalleled world-wide conflagration. If only holding one’s breath would help, you might see many who are observing the current ebbs and flows in our current place in time turning very bluish purple as they try to make a difference.

Beyond the Cusp