By Abigail Hauslohner/ Cairo Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012
Mohamed Morsi, left, of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian presidential hopeful Amr Moussa, right, talk before Christmas Eve mass, led by Coptic Pope Shenouda III at the Coptic cathedral in Cairo, Egypt, Jan. 6, 2012. Maya Alleruzzo / AP
The new year in Egypt has ushered in a new parliament, dominated for the first time in Egypt's history by Islamists. And with that comes the question of just how those newly empowered Islamists — led by the Muslim Brotherhood with nearly half the seats — will run the country.
Some activists and politicians have predicted that a violent confrontation will ensue between the military and the Islamist bloc, as a tug-of-war for power and influence, particularly in the drafting of Egypt's new constitution, engulfs the months ahead. They say the Islamist parties, who together hold roughly 62% of parliament, will push forward with the implementation of Shari'a — Islamic law — as well as legislation to curtail the military's power and immunity. And they predict that the military will do everything in its power to stop them. "This would give us a new Algeria," says Islam Ahmed Abdallah, a follower of the ultra-conservative Salafi interpretation of Islam, who runs a center geared toward combatting "Christian evangelism." Egypt's Islamists have a history of violent struggle against the regime, he reasons. And if the military challenges their rightfully won authority, Egypt could deteriorate into the kind of violence that wracked Algeria in the 1990s after its military pre-emptively shut down a similar Islamist win.
But other analysts say that a dramatic power play simply isn't in the cards. Rather, argues Kent State University political scientist Joshua Stacher, the dynamic has already been drafted, and it has little to do with extremists like Abdallah, who, embodied in the Salafi Nour party, now control an estimated quarter of the seats in parliament. "The real negotiations will happen at the top of the regime between the Muslim Brotherhood and SCAF [the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces]," he says.
The Brotherhood spent decades organizing, despite the heavy-handed repression inflicted by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. After participating in the uprising to oust him last winter, the Brotherhood quickly rose to become Egypt's most powerful political party. With their dominance in parliament solidified, the players who matter in charting Egypt's future have been whittled down to two big ones: the Muslim Brotherhood, and the powerful military that Mubarak left behind. Stacher is hardly the only observer to speculate that the two actors are already deeply engaged in closed-door negotiations for Egypt's future distribution of power. Egyptian liberals have warned of such a conspiracy since the spring, alleging that a negotiated partnership kept the Brotherhood out of Tahrir Square (where the liberals have directed their protests against the military council) and cemented the group's win in elections.
The Brotherhood has categorically denied any such backroom deals. But recent weeks of politicking suggest that they also have little intention of throwing their lot in a coalition with their fellow Islamists, the Salafis. Brotherhood officials made it clear this week that they have abandoned earlier calls for Egypt to become a parliamentary — rather than presidential — system, in a move that lifts pressure off the military, and will likely spark condemnation from the ultra-Islamists and liberals. A top Brotherhood official told The New York Times that the group would accept the leadership of military-appointed Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri until July, by which point the military has already said an elected president will take power.
Brotherhood officials have also reached out to American and European diplomatic partners in recent weeks, and have assured both constituents and international partners of their commitment to moderate and inclusive policies in the months ahead. Over the weekend, Brotherhood leaders attended the Coptic Christmas mass at Cairo's main church in a gesture to the country's increasingly wary Christian minority, even as Salafi groups lambasted Christmas celebrations as haram — or un-Islamic. "My sense is that the Brothers feel like the Salafis are politically immature," says Stacher, who notes that the two Islamist blocs also have very different visions of an Islamic Egypt. And the Brotherhood, which as an organization is better acquainted with regime heavy-handedness than the rookie Salafi parties, also knows the military still has the upper hand when it comes to arms and resources. "The Brothers have never really gone for broke, and they're not going to go for broke now," Stacher says. "Now that the Muslim Brotherhood has had their little taste of freedom they're not going back to prison."
Still, the fast rise of the Brotherhood to political prominence doesn't necessarily write the smaller players out of the scene; it merely marginalizes them. Stacher predicts that violent confrontations between the military and liberals or other groups — like the security crackdowns on protesters in Tahrir Square that have left more than 80 people dead since October — will continue in 2012. "Now that the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis both have seats, SCAF will try to use them against non-Islamist groups. They can kind of favor the Islamists to get the secularists all worked up," he says. "Or they can play the groups off one another."
Abdallah, the Salafi scholar, says the liberals' influence is on the wane. "Now we are going to control the country," he says. "America will support the liberals with money for a long time, but by the end, they'll be the second Karzai," he adds, comparing their inevitable decline to that of the U.S.-backed president of Afghanistan.
Abdallah's confident rhetoric also raises the specter of the Salafi wild card. Namely, what happens if the most extreme members of parliament find themselves sidelined, either by a Brotherhood seeking a more moderate politics, or by a military that slows — or even derails — their quest for pure Islamic law? (Shari'a law is already a basis of the current Egyptian constitution.)
Some Egyptians report that in Egypt's post-Mubarak security vaccuum, some Salafi groups have already started taking matters of Islamic jurisprudence into their own hands. Rumors abound about Salafis enforcing their interpretation of Shari'a on public spaces. In one Alexandria school, Salafis reportedly ordered the segregation of boys and girls; and a Cairo-based blog reported a Salafi attempt to shut down a women's beauty parlor in the Nile Delta. "I am not against living in a country with a religious background," says Marco Safa, a Christian university student in Cairo. "But they have to remember that they are not alone here. They need to respect the rest of the people, and private freedoms should be guaranteed."
A facebook group supporting the "Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" — the shadowy organization that some Egyptians allege is behind the recent incidents, and which claims a connection to the Salafis' Nour Party — proposes nothing in matters of parliamentary legislation. Rather, it advises its thousands of facebook fans to "save the Shari'a of God in his lands, and to work according to what he has sent us in his beloved book."
Indeed, Abdallah says the ultra-Islamists, if sidelined, won't need to push legislation anyway; the people will enforce Islamist decrees on their own. "The Egyptians are not satisfied with living with wine in their streets," he says. "And the people, not Islamists [in parliament], are the ones who will stop this in the streets," he adds. "We just started in parliament. So give the sword to the people."
With reporting by Sharaf Al-Hourani/Cairo
Egypt's New Political Equation: The Military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis - TIME
