Mohammad Fadel, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, talks to Brown Political Review’s Annika Lichtenbaum about the past months’ political upheaval in Egypt. Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism. He is Egyptian-American.
Brown Political Review: Your bio on Twitter claims you have “reluctantly concluded that the people don’t want a regime.” What exactly do you mean by that?
Mohammad Fadel: During the 2011 revolution, one of the chants was, “Ash-shab yureed isqat al-nizam”: the people wish to depose the regime. After [President Hosni] Mubarak resigned, I put on my Twitter feed that the new slogan was, “The people want to build the regime.” Mubarak survived by essentially destroying all institutions of public life, subverting them, effectively giving people free reign to do whatever they wished without any sense of legal accountability. So it was my belief that Egyptians needed to rebuild everything from the ground up, to restore a sense of institutional integrity to the state.
But what I saw instead, after Morsi became president, was essentially results-oriented politics. They really weren’t thinking about the kind of process that needs to be in place to achieve those results. So when Morsi failed to reform, he became illegitimate, a traitor.
I decided reluctantly that people don’t want a new regime. They just want things. There’s a difference. I thought those questions were really second-order problems. There were lots of things that needed to be achieved in terms of institution-building and procedures before you could begin to see substantive improvements. But instead of trying to change things to reform the political process, Egyptians insisted on constantly going out into the streets, challenging whatever new institutions were coming up and depriving the only elected official in government of any legitimacy. So I decided reluctantly that people don’t want a new regime. They just want things. There’s a difference. And ultimately, that led to [the demonstrations on] June 30. Because there was no way that any transitional government in Egypt could have delivered the things that Egyptians wanted.
BPR: Then where would you place most of the blame?
Fadel: Part of the problem is that Morsi over-promised and under-delivered. But that’s usually what happens in a democracy: politicians overpromise and under-deliver; we punish them by voting them out of office. We don’t punish them by asking the military to throw them in jail. So the problem was that Egyptian political culture didn’t accept the idea that substantive results could only be obtained over a prolonged period of time.
BPR: So was it a revolution or a coup?
Fadel: It’s a revolution in a legal sense, in that what happened was outside of the law. Whether it’s a good revolution or a bad revolution — that’s a different question. I think here, it was a bad revolution. It was a revolution that took Egypt backwards. It made the prospect of genuine, accountable government under the rules of democracy less likely than it was before. This is the real tragedy. I find it very unlikely that the new government is going to be able to solve any of the problems that exist in the country. The problems were extremely deep and intractable to begin with. So how is restoring an authoritarian police state, where opposition is squelched, going to help anything? It’s going to make it worse.
BPR: How should the interim government deal with the Muslim Brotherhood going forward?
Fadel: The dynamics of [any] revolution are such that you can’t kiss and make up afterwards. It’s quite a serious thing. This summer’s demonstrations reduced the options available to the country instead of expanding them. If the interim government allows the Muslim Brotherhood to re-emerge in the political process, then they risk being the subject of revenge in the future. It was very hard to come to a compromise on both sides, because if the Muslim Brotherhood just rolled everything up and went home, that would be an admission that it was legitimate to exclude them. On the other hand, if the other side granted them any substantial concessions, that would have meant that the June 30 [demonstrations were] not legitimate. So I think that was the dilemma.
BPR: We’ve heard that Egypt is going to hold elections in the spring. Do you think that will happen? And if so, will they be able to produce meaningful results?
Fadel: I don’t doubt that they [the interim government] actually will have these elections. But what are the chances that these elections are going to be representative in any meaningful way? Very little, because they’re showing contempt for organized politics. The earliest drafts of the new parliamentary elections law will have candidates run as individuals, not as members of parties. And so the parliament is extremely weak, because if you can’t have cohesive parties involved, you can’t have meaningful coalitions develop that can challenge entrenched interests. What’s the point of it? This is a victory for the state.
BPR: What do you think will be the state of Egypt’s relationship with the United States going forward?
Fadel: I think this goes again to the justifications of the coup. One of the reasons why I call it a coup, or not a legitimate or good revolution, is the irrationality of much of its discourse. A lot of it was based on extremely xenophobic rhetoric, much of it obviously absurd. When you have many in the opposition calling Morsi a U.S. Zionist agent, when you have a justice of the Supreme Court accusing Obama of being part of the international Muslim Brotherhood, you know that things have gone off the edge of normalcy and rationality. It’s as though the Egyptian opposition has been taken over by the Tea Party.
This is going to create a problem, because the United States is a very important backer of Egypt. If anti-Americanism is such a central plank of the rhetoric of this new regime, why are they upset that they’re not getting the support they think Egypt needs and deserves from the United States? Egyptians have to understand that Egypt really needs the United States, not the other way around. And the sooner they’re disabused of this notion that they are central to the stability and functioning of the world, they might actually begin to focus on Egypt’s real problems, instead of demanding things that their position in the world doesn’t merit.