{"id":29131,"date":"2013-07-09T13:52:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T09:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=29131"},"modified":"2013-07-09T13:52:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T09:52:41","slug":"democracy-and-revolutions-drawing-a-line-is-not-easy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-politics-analysis\/democracy-and-revolutions-drawing-a-line-is-not-easy\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy and Revolutions: Drawing a Line Is Not Easy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mideast-egypt-protests\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Democracy is constituted by the express and active will of real, living people, not by a box; this is especially true when these people are engaged in an on-going revolution, charting their and their nation\u2019s future<\/i><\/p>\n

The US government, a substantial section of mainstream Western media and the ousted Muslim Brotherhood all seem to agree: what took place in Egypt over the past few days was a military coup, a setback for the country\u2019s alleged \u201ctransition\u201d to democracy.<\/p>\n

Irrespective of the variety of vested interests involved, what the three detractors of one of the most potent popular revolutionary upsurges in modern history share is contempt. Twenty-two million signatures (at nearly 50 percent of the nation\u2019s adult population) are collected demanding the ousting of the president; the same demand is made by some 17 million people (at nearly 30 percent of the adult population) as they hit the streets throughout the country, in what has been described as the biggest demonstration in the history of mankind, and they do so against a barrage of threats and predictions warning of 30 June\u2019s \u201crivers of blood,\u201d and stay there.<\/p>\n

Unprecedented it may be, yet not really worth seeing (the Washington Post persisted in speaking of \u201crival demonstrations\u201d between Morsi supporters and the \u201copposition\u201d), it is not democracy; it is the army and the \u201cdeep state.\u201d Nothing short of the most profound sense of contempt for these very people could explain such utter blindness.<\/p>\n

For the Muslim Brotherhood the contempt is deep-seated within a doctrine that constructs the leaders of the Gama\u2019a as the ultimate interpreters of God\u2019s will on earth, and as such owed blind obedience, and a lot of hand-kissing, by their \u201cflock\u201d \u2013 little wonder then that a rebellious Egyptian people have come to call them \u201csheep.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the Western side of the above equation \u2013 and I am still dealing here with ideological perspective rather than crass interest \u2013 it is the equally deep-seated conviction that such people as Arabs and Muslims are incapable of insisting on the sort of \u201cliberties\u201d that \u201cWestern Man\u201d takes for granted.<\/p>\n

Certainly, race has become pass\u00e9, now replaced by \u201cculture,\u201d but what with our ostensibly inherent and immutable \u201cMuslim\u201d culture all we presumably can hope for is the kind of stunted and deformed \u201cdemocracy\u201d that Morsi and his tribe were offering us, never mind freedom of expression, speech, belief, assembly and protest, never mind also the frenzied power grab of Mubarak\u2019s oligarchic and deeply authoritarian state machinery, kept fully intact but for the change of its bosses.<\/p>\n

(In June of this year, the deposed Brotherhood president appointed in one sweep 17 new governors from among his group and its allies, a mere three months ahead of planned parliamentary elections, the better to rig them more effectively).<\/p>\n

None of it, however, seemed to really matter, minor snags along the \u201ctransition,\u201d since all we Arabs and Muslims could hope for and deserve is a 2 percent margin in the ballot box \u2013 that is democracy enough in terms of our \u201cculture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, there is another aspect to the blindness. Throughout history, popular revolutions by one people have had a tendency to inspire revolutionary upsurges by other peoples, just as Egypt\u2019s was inspired by Tunisia\u2019s, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria by both. For such a revolution to lead to a bungling, grimly oppressive Islamist regime, whose single claim to \u201cdemocracy\u201d is ostensibly \u201cfree and fair\u201d elections is to drastically undercut such inspirational value. Would the Greeks find inspiration in such an outcome, or the Brazilians?<\/p>\n

It was only on the fourth day of Egypt\u2019s second revolution, and following intense American pressure to keep Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in power, that US President Barak Obama seemed to discover \u2013 all of a sudden \u2013 that democracy is not reducible to the ballot box.<\/p>\n

Well, hey hurray! In fact, the history of democracy the world over is one where democratic liberties are won on the street, not the ballot box. Even if we set aside the founding democratic revolutions of the modern world, from Cromwell to Robespierre, via America\u2019s founding fathers (beside which Egypt\u2019s twin revolutions appear sparkling clean \u2013 \u201clegitimacy\u201d \u2013 wise), the extension of the franchise was won on the street, and so was the right of women to vote; trade unions, which were crucial in defining the very meaning of democracy and democratic liberties in today\u2019s world, did not come out of the ballot box, but were born and evolved on shop-floors and on the street, and so has been the redefining of democracy in terms of women\u2019s rights and liberation, well beyond the right to vote.<\/p>\n

And last but not least Mr. Obama, need we remind you that the mere thought of running for office would not have occurred to you had it not been for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Greensborro Sit-Ins, the March on Washington and the hundreds of other battles, big and small, waged with tremendous sacrifice, on the streets of the self-proclaimed \u201cgreatest democracy on earth,\u201d by a great many people, including such \u201clegitimacy\u201d?unsavory characters as Malcolm X, Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis?<\/p>\n

A very long and heroic march, full of blood and tears, put you in office Mr. Obama, and it was on the street that the heroes of these battles marched. And throughout the ballot box merely translated, almost always partially, and in stunted form, the gains won, yes, on the street.<\/p>\n

Which seems to bring us straight back to our own erstwhile president, Dr. Morsi himself.<\/p>\n

In his final, customarily incoherent, address to the nation, the former president (and don\u2019t you just love the prefix \u201cformer\u201d attached to the title of two presidents in a little over as many years) repeated the word \u201clegitimacy\u201d literally dozens of times. But here is a little reminder Mr. former-president, you were actually in prison when your predecessor, the \u201clegitimate\u201d president of the country, voted into his fourth term in what your American and other Western allies then hailed as Egypt\u2019s first multi-candidate presidential elections, was illegitimately unseated. (There was nothing in the Egyptian Constitution then in force that allowed the president to cede his powers to something called the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces \u2013 SCAF).<\/p>\n

We do not know the real story behind your escape from prison, whether it was the people in charge who broke you out of it, or a Hamas contingent imported especially for that purpose, as has been suggested in recent months. And frankly, I do not care. Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders were political prisoners, and in a revolution, setting political prisoners free is right and proper, even if \u201cillegitimate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The thing is, of course, that since the revolution the powers that be in Egypt, hijackers all, have been juggling \u201crevolutionary legitimacy\u201d and formal, legal legitimacy as stipulated by the Constitution and the law of the land, willy-nilly, arbitrarily \u2013 and always in ways best tailored to suite their immediate ends. The SCAF did so, over and over again, and so did the Muslim Brotherhood.<\/p>\n

The starkest and most flagrant example of this was the \u201celected\u201d president\u2019s flaunting of constitution, law and democratic norms, by issuing, in November 2012, a Constitutional Declaration immunising his decisions against judicial review, immunising as well that mockery of a legislative body, the consultative Shura Council (the third of which members are appointed by the president, the other two-thirds scornfully voted in by a measly 7 percent of the electorate), and vesting it meanwhile with full legislative authority, and immunising furthermore, a Constituent Assembly, which had been transformed into a closed club of the Muslim Brotherhood an its Salafi and Jihadi allies. Both these institutions had been facing imminent rulings of unconstitutionality by Egypt\u2019s Supreme Constitutional Court.<\/p>\n

And what was Morsi\u2019s justification of such draconian measures which clearly aimed at perpetuating the Muslim Brotherhood\u2019s sway over the country until such a time as humanity meets its maker? \u201cRevolutionary legitimacy!\u201d Well, Mr. former-president, this is exactly what is called being \u201choist by your own petard,\u201d with the added qualification that yours\u2019 was that of a hijacker, while the people who unseated you derived their revolutionary legitimacy from a real, living revolution, historically unprecedented by virtue of 22 million signatures, by virtue of millions on the streets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HANI SHURKALLAH, TABSIR: How could the people of Egypt support the parody of democracy that the Muslim Brotherhood had established? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":29145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,124,83,235,60],"tags":[1209,3593,125,18300,16840,127,17582,2323,16861,16483,17583,191,16581,389,18286,16838,1808,4647,5244,18330,18302],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29131"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29148,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29131\/revisions\/29148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}