Painful Truths

Egypt's dishourable cowards

Back in February this year, just one day before the fall of Hosni Mubarak, when many Egyptians were labouring under the illusion that the army was their friend and protector, I said on this blog:

Please, let us all shed our illusions. The Egyptian army is the enemy of the Egyptian people. Some might say this can't be so because the army consists of conscripts, i.e. is made up of the people. That is true, but make no mistake: these conscripts will not hesitate to massacre their own people.

Let us have faith in ourselves. To hell with the army, the police and all the other tools of repression. If the army consisted of real men, then let these men go and fight the real enemy, the enemy whose permission they have to get in order to tread on their own soil in Sinai. Let them go and fight and not surrender in their tens of thousands, as we've seen in 1967 and 1973.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and if there's a silver lining to the mayhem that is now unfolding in Egypt it is that the Egyptian people must by now be shedding all the illusions they have had about their armed forces.

The photograph and video below speak for themselves. The thugs of the Egyptian army – the cowards who dishohoured Egypt not just in 1967 and 1973, but also in 1948 and 1956 – can be seen beating a defenceless, female protester for daring to exercise her inalienable right to protest against the oppression, deception, corruption and privilege of the so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

Predicatably, the SCAF's defenders argue that the incident, which was witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people, never happened and that the image of the woman being beaten had been manipulated. Presumably, they would say the same about the video below, which shows the same woman and a companion being chased then beaten by the brave soldiers.

 

Egypt's armed forces are interested only in protecting their considerable privileges and in enriching themselves. Despite the billions of dollars in US handouts on which they survive and for which they would sell their own mothers, the Egyptian armed forces are not a fighting force in any real, professional sense of the word. Incompetent and incapable of securing a street, let alone fighting another army, they are just one or two levels up on the defunct Gaddafi's thugs. 

Back in 1978 the elite of Egypt's army, Unit 777, was deployed in Malta to free an Egyptian aircraft that had been hijacked. Deluded into thinking that they could imitate the Israeli raid on Entebbe two years earlier, they succeeded only in killing 57 of the 88 hostages, who were reportedly mistaken for the hijackers. 

Thirty-four years have passed since then but, by all accounts, nothing has changed. Egypt's army today is made up of dehumanized, poorly trained, badly educated, semi-literate peasants who are led by corrupt dinasaurs and their cronies, a hierarchy of mediocrities who know little about military strategy and tactics and care less and whose paramount purpose is to preserve their power and privilges.

The revolution that began on 25 January 2011 has only just begun and will not be complete until the dishonourable, incompetent and corrupt traitors in the Egyptian army are purged and brought to account for betraying the people and the country they are supposed to defend.

Is Islam the solution?

How long will it take until the Islamists that are now reaping the rewards of the Arab uprisings which they initially shunned – the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – are exposed for what they are: backward, mentally retarded charlatans, hypocrites and misogynists?

Writing in the Arabist blog, (“Egypt’s Islamists and tourism”) the writer and analyst Issandr El Amrani says:

We are now at a point when the comfortable role of opposition no longer holds for Islamists; it's time to be serious about one's positions and their consequences.

A few years ago, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood MPs in [the Egyptian] parliament opposed a law that would tighten the ban on female genital mutilation (a practice that has absolutely no basis in Islam; it's largely a Nile Valley thing) and also opposed a law banning child beatings. If they are just traditionalists, let them say that. But if they want to invoke religion, they better make their case with full theological and scriptural backing.

Unfortunately, female genital mutilations and child beatings are not the Islamists’ only warts.

According to El Amrani, it would seem that the Islamists also believe that it is possible for tourism in Egypt to flourish without alcohol, with segregated beaches and with the manipulation of Pharaonic statues, such as those depicting fertility gods, to conceal nudity.

He quotes a veiled Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Azza al-Jarf, who told a cheering crowd of supporters at a campaign event dubbed "Let's encourage tourism" on 11 December: “Tourists don't need to drink alcohol when they come to Egypt; they have plenty at home… They come to see the ancient civilization, not to drink alcohol." The crowd chanted: "Tourism will be at its best under Freedom and Justice," the Brotherhood's party and the most influential political group to emerge after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

In addition, prominent Salafi clerics, such as Yasser Bourhami, are advocating restrictions on tourism, the source of livelihood for millions of Egyptians. In an interview with the private Egyptian channel Dream TV, Bourhami described one of his grand ideas for boosting the tourism industry: "A five-star hotel with no alcohol, a beach for women –  sisters –  separated from men in a bay where the two sides can enjoy a holiday for a week without sins."

Another Islamist genius, Tarek Shalaan, who is a prominent member of the Salafi Al-Nur Party, “stumbled through a recent TV interview when asked about his views on the display of nude Pharaonic statues like those depicting fertility gods”, accordng to El Amrani. "The antiquities that we have will be put under a different light to focus on historical events," Shalaan said.

And there’s more.

However, now that they’re “in power”, at least in Tunisia and Egypt, it’s time to question some of the Islamists’ main planks.

One example is the slogan of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, ‑ “Islam is the solution”.  How, exactly will Islam solve Egypt’s economic problems – its grinding poverty and over population? What’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s answer to this, beyond abolishing usury, i.e. introducing “Islamic banking”, which will do absolutely nothing to address the country’s pressing needs?

The answer, alas, is nothing. The Islamists have no economic or foreign or any other policy beyond getting to power and putting women, minorities and others who are not exactly like them in their place. And if you ask yourself how a major party and its variants throughout the Arab world can survive without a policy, the answer is very simple. The answer is common knowledge among Islamists but they are somewhat reluctant to articulate it in public among non-members, for fear of being ridiculed. The Islamists’ answer to all of society’s problems, from unemployment, overpopulation and poor public services to ritual humiliations at the hands of Israel and its ilk, is simply this: if you please God he will solve all your problems. That’s it! You need do nothing further than indulge in activities which, in the Islamists’ eyes, will please God. And he will do the rest. Now you can see why they are shy of articulating this absurd view to the world at large and are comfortable in sharing it only among themselves.

But the big black cloud hovering over all Islamists remains the well-grounded suspicion that they remain anti-democrats and would, when the time is ripe, abolish democracy and institute a theocracy. In my opinion, the suspicion that, in essence, all Islamist parties believe in “One man, one vote, one time” is as true today as it ever was.

According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misri Al-Yawm, only a few days ago a member of Al-Nur Party’s Supreme Committee, Shaaban Darwish, told a party rally in Giza that democracy is heresy because it contradicts the principle of allegiance that was used after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, whereby people choose their caliph once and then remain loyal to him.

One must therefore beware of the Islamists’ pro-democracy "propaganda". As Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya TV, says ("The Islamists: between propaganda and the truth"):

Since the ouster of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, many people … claim that the image of the Islamists has been distorted by the Arabs and the West to prevent them from political participation. Following the revolutions, the Islamist party leaders rushed to improve their image in the eyes of the West, issuing statements stressing that they would not prohibit bikinis from their countries' beaches, or outlaw alcohol, and that they would accept a woman or Christian as leader.

Of course, these speeches are nothing more than public relations, and something that can only be believed by someone ignorant of the region or the logic of religious parties. If the claim of freedom of religion is true, it expresses the opinion of only a few [religious party] leaders, as the majority of leaders and members of such groups consider "purifying" society to be their first duty, and it would not be long before they turned against those political leaders urging tolerance.

Arab society is going through difficult developments that may lead to more dictatorships under the name of democracy, such as what happened in Iran. Therefore, we cannot settle for reading their intentions and believing their propaganda. If these societies … truly want a democratic approach and want to grant an opportunity for all political forces  ‑ including the Islamist and Arab nationalist forces ‑ to participate, they must build a state that is based on a constitution that protects rights, and an army that understands that its duty is not to rule, but to protect democratic institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament, and prevent the democratic system from being overthrown….

In other words, the solution to our countries’ problems is to build democratic, law-governed states that treat all of their citizens as equals, irrespective of gender, colour, ethnicity, faith or no faith.

The solution is not Islam.

Islam and modernity

The Afghan scholar Nushin Arbabzadah has written an excellent article on the adaptability of Islam to modern times ("Can traditional Islam adapt to the needs of western Muslims?").

In it she relates how the sermon given at her father's funeral in the German city of Hamburg was both incomprehensible and irrelevant.

I waited for the mercy and compassion that Muslims referred to every time they said "bismillah"...

Soon I gave up on listening altogether. The imam might as well have spoken Korean, a language as unfamiliar to me as the Arabic in which the sermon was conducted. I wondered why was I not allowed to hear the words of God in my own language?... For the first time in my life, I really needed religion to give me solace, but here I was, listening to an unfamiliar language where the word "devil" kept popping up, alarming rather than comforting me.

When the language finally switched to Persian, I hoped to get something out of the Hadith [the Prophet Muhammad's sayings]. But to my alarm, even though the Hadith and the imam's interpretation of them were in my language, I failed to understand how they related to the life and death of my father. We were in Hamburg, in the north of Europe, but the imam told a story that took us to the Arab lands of the eighth century, where a group of believers were hiding inside a cave. It was a tale of violence, an attempted mass murder, from which the believers were saved after God miraculously created a spider's net, covering the cave's front and misleading the prospective killers.

Nushin describes only her own, sad experience in Hamburg. But the problem isn't just confined to Muslim clerics failing to make Islam relevant to the needs of the diasporic communities of the West, Arabic speaking or not.

The problem is far wider than that: all the mainstream expressions of Islam, regardless of language, are largely irrelevant to Muslims wherever they are, be it in the Arab world, Asia or the diaspora. I am an Arabic speaker but whenever I hear Muslims – clerics or otherwise – talking about religion I end up feeling exactly the way Nushin felt at her father's funeral. In fact, I begin to wonder whether I am in the seventh or the 21st century.

As individuals, we are free to be as backward or as progressive as we like, provided we do no harm to others. But as societies, we in the Muslim world have a big problem on our hands. In the Arab component of that world, large sections of our societies appear to be gripped by backwardness, yearning not to catch up with the 21st century after years of stagnation under incompetent and corrupt dictatorships but to go back to the seventh century, as is clear from the election results in Tunisia and Egypt, and from the utterances of public figures in Libya.

There is no easy or quick answer to this problem. My feeling is that our societies must first taste the full experience of Islamist backwardness – the "Full Monty" of retards as represented by the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – before turning against it and having their critical faculties collectively jump-started. Hopefully, people will then begin to look to more modern and forward-looking interpretations of Islam, ones that respect people as human beings and their right to say what they want to say, believe in what they want to believe and wear what they want to wear.

This will take time, perhaps as long as we have endured the dictatorships of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali.