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| June 16, 2015. AP Photo |
This upsetting photo of Ikhwan members sentenced to death by hanging dredged up a memory of another courtroom cage many years ago. In December 1999, on the Haikstep military base, 20 Ikhwan professionals were being tried in a military tribunal on charges of “infiltrating professional associations.” It was the first courtroom I’d ever been in, and what a strange one it was. A cage took up the entire left length of the room; all 20 men in it were dressed in spotless white gallabiyas. I remember Khaled Badawi, a loquacious lawyer and bar association activist, now a member of Dr. Mohamed Morsi’s legal team. Next to him was Mokhtar Nouh, a big personality who loved the limelight, now a rabid anti-Ikhwan propagandist. Mohamed Ali Bishr was there, the engineer who later became a governor then a minister during Morsi’s presidency and is now in prison. And usually sitting quietly deep inside the cage was Mohamed Badie, the veterinarian who became the Brothers’ General Guide in 2010 and who is now among those sentenced to death.
Family members and lawyers packed into uncomfortable
wooden pews, made even more punishing by the December chill, and military
policemen in red berets stood languidly in the aisles. On a dais sat the three
military officers-cum-judges, headed by Gen. Ahmad al-Anwar, a ruddy-faced man who
used to close his eyes in listening rapture when Khaled Badawi chanted a
heartrending adhan from inside the cage. Once the proceedings were over for the day we would spill outdoors
into the fading daylight, waiting for the military buses to transport us back to
the base entrance. Standing somewhat apart from the crowd in his lawyerly black
robes was the great Wafdist and true liberal Atef al-Banna, who was there to
defend the 20 professionals on principle. On the bus we shared a seat and a
somber silence, as everyone else jabbered on as if we were heading back from a
day trip.
That military trial was my first up-close encounter
with the Egyptian state’s rhetoric. Up to that point I’d only read official
speeches and pronouncements, but never seen what those ideas looked like in
action. The entire set-up of a military tribunal to try civilian activists was
simply political repression by legal means. The Mubarak regime started sending
Muslim Brothers to military tribunals in 1995, to prevent them from making the
gains in national polls that they had achieved in professional association
elections. That was what the 1999 trial was about; the 20 defendants were
sentenced to 3-5 years in prison, to cripple the Ikhwan from planning an
effective election strategy in the 2000 general elections. In the event, 17 second-tier,
mostly unknown Ikhwan members secured seats. The leader of this tiny parliamentary
bloc was an obscure engineering professor from Sharqiyya named Mohamed Morsi.
Judging from Judge Shaaban al-Shamy’s statement
yesterday before delivering his death sentences, the Egyptian state’s rhetoric
doesn’t seem to have changed all that much from 1999, or 1954 for that matter.
Shamy mouthed the tropes in use for decades by the police state to criminalize citizen
political engagement. Since their founding in 1928, Shamy declaimed, the Ikhwan
organization “had in its veins a mixture of religion and politics, outwardly
professing religion but inwardly seeking politics.”
As usual, he cast the Muslim Brothers as a
feral, conspiratorial force, forever seeking to “pounce on power even at the
expense of the nation and people, encouraging bloodletting and conspiring with
foreign organizations to realize its diabolic goals under the cloak of
religion.”
What is new in Shamy’s little speech is
accounting for the post-2011 novelty of mass mobilization. Here the commanders
of the Egyptian state have simply appropriated the popular risings, passing over
January 25th as if it didn’t happen and casting June 30th
as a patriotic pro-state insurrection against the evil dividers of the organically
unified nation. “On that day droves of this proud people poured forth all over
the country to demand a strong, coherent society that does not exclude any of
its sons, and ends the state of conflict and division.”
Egyptian reactionary thought has always been
around, of course, but it took the 2011 revolution to gather it up into a
semi-coherent doctrine. Egyptian reactionaries within the state, the crony business
class, and segments of the middle and even working classes are constructing a
worldview that equates political pluralism with chaos, defines power rotation
as “bringing down the state,” and is offended, no, terrified by the
political agency of the lower orders, especially when they dare to vote for parliamentary Islamists.
To historians, it’s old news that revolutions
often end up crystallizing and formalizing reactionary orders. But for the rest
of us who so hoped never again to see political activists in a courtroom, it’s an
enduring source of grief.
*The title of this post is inspired by Albert
Hirschman’s luminous book dissecting centuries of conservative thought.
