A History of the Middle East (75 page)

Excluded and targeted by the new power constellation, youth leaders whose Tahrir protests had ignited the fuse that brought down Mubarak laid claim to the mantle of popular as opposed to elected sovereignty and resumed their protests. Judges who had challenged Mubarak’s autocracy laid the same charges at Morsi. ‘Mubarak in beards,’ they chided. Former stalwarts of the Muslim Brotherhood split from the movement in disgust. Kamal al-Helbawi, the Brotherhood’s former spokesman in Europe, returned from exile, but resigned from the movement in protest at its despotic drift. ‘The Brotherhood left Tahrir Square early. They only went to the square for their own interests and described the people in the square as “thugs”,’ he complained. Protestors broke through the cordon of the presidential palace threatening a second revolution, only to face Brotherhood members armed with clubs. Although Morsi managed to persuade the protestors to disperse after cancelling the decree that gave him legal immunity, Egypt was increasingly polarized between rival Islamist and liberal blocs. Sensing the mounting opposition to the Brotherhood’s grip on power, the old security forces flexed their muscles, asserting their authority in Sinai and weighed their prospects for a comeback.

Sister movements elsewhere in the region appeared similarly bent on monopolizing power. After its 2006 electoral triumph, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas used its armed wing to oust Fatah-run security forces from Gaza, and resisted calls to hold elections long after its term in office had expired. It jailed opponents, banned protests, and killed armed Salafi
jihadis
that challenged its legitimacy. Tunisia’s new Islamist rulers continued to retain a state media and censor the press. And they overruled their first prime minister, Hamudi
Jebali, who wanted to hand power to a caretaker government of technocrats, prompting him to resign in February 2012.

As hungry for power as their secular predecessors, the Islamists proved similarly pragmatic. With remarkable ease, they mothballed ideologies which had sustained them in opposition when they cried that Islam is the solution and
Sharia
their constitution. Hizbollah joined Lebanon’s ruling coalition and built alliances with non-Shia parties, particularly Christian leader Michel Aoun; it downplayed its earlier aspiration to uphold Islamic law, and in its November 2009 update to its founding manifesto of 1985 the movement abandoned its formal allegiance to Iran’s ruling doctrine of
velayat al-faqih
, or theocratic rule. Once in power, Hamas’s government in Gaza transformed itself from a guerrilla group into a government, and like Egypt’s Brotherhood joined Christians for Christmas celebrations and shelved plans to impose Islamic law. In Cairo, the Brotherhood negotiated backroom deals with Egypt’s military. Although he dissolved the SCAF and dismissed its top generals, Morsi left the military’s former power largely intact. The Islamists’ new constitution left the army in control of its vast assets, spared the defence budget from public scrutiny and pronounced that the defence minister should come from the ranks of the armed forces, an undertaking that Mubarak had shied from.

The Brotherhood was not alone in shedding long-held positions. Pre-revolution, the quietest Salafi preachers had shown a readiness to deal with the Mubarak regime, on the grounds that regime-change was a matter for God not man, and in return secured state licenses for television stations, which broadcast a Muslim version of American TV evangelism. When Brotherhood preachers used their pulpits to summon the faithful to protest, Salafi muezzins kept mum. Yahya Hajouri, a Salafi savant in Yemen, decried the Arab Awakening as a western virus and ‘a plague sparked by a Masonic doctrine’. But no sooner had the autocrats fallen, than the Salafis adapted their theology to the new order. Their mentors endorsed participation in politics and sanctioned elections as a manifestation not a sacrilege of the divine will. Devotees hurriedly printed campaign posters and erected coloured billboards promoting candidates, including women – albeit
with a rose in place of their faces. Unlike the Brotherhood which was increasingly seen as a middle class and white-collar movement, they fared particularly well in North Africa’s urban slums, where their acolytes ran welfare projects reaching the 40 percent of Egyptians who lived on less than a dollar per day.

Salafis with a
jihadi
bent proved equally versatile in jettisoning political violence and entering political systems that they had previously pronounced a sin. Freed from the shackles of Egypt’s prisons, which for four decades had served as laboratories for
jihadi
creeds, they swore oaths of allegiance to Egypt’s parliament. ‘I am taking the political line; I have turned the page on the past, and opened the door to peaceful action,’ declared Aboud al-Zumar, a former Egyptian intelligence officer and emir of the
jihad
group which killed Sadat in 1981, released from prison after 30 years in jail. He formed a political party which contested Egypt’s first post-Mubarak elections, winning.

Islamists of all hues proved similarly accommodating to external constraints, readily upholding the
status quo
they had challenged in opposition. Continued strategic relations with the US appeared a given not least to ensure the continuation of US aid. ‘So long as there is popular will for this, I believe that Egypt will have good relations with the US,’ declared al-Zumar. Remarkably, former al-Qaeda fighters appealed for more rather than less western intervention in their struggle to dislodge Qaddafy’s regime, adopting a discourse which only a few years earlier would have been condemned as treacherous.

The Brotherhood’s U-turn on Israel was as surprising. When the SCAF had run Egypt, its leaders had praised the protestors who had stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo, demanded Egypt cancel its gas deal with Israel, and sever the remnants of an Israeli–Egyptian relationship. At the rally announcing Morsi as the Brotherhood’s candidate for president, a cleric had even hailed Morsi as the liberator of Jerusalem and the harbinger of the Caliphate of the ‘United States of the Arabs’. But once in power, Morsi upheld the Camp David accords with Israel. Though he refused to meet with Israelis, he appointed an ambassador to Tel Aviv, and after briefly flirting
with the deployment of tanks in Sinai’s demilitarized zone, maintained security coordination with Israel. As Mubarak before him, he brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas after their eight-day confrontation in November 2012. Israeli security officials gleefully noted that Morsi did more to constrain the tunnel traffic and arms-trafficking with Gaza than his predecessor.

Egypt’s Islamists were not alone in moderating their anti-Israel policies. In its revised manifesto of 2009, Hizbollah advocated the liberation of Jerusalem, whose Eastern half Israel occupied in 1967, but stopped short of calling for Israel’s destruction. After its pummelling in the 2006 war, it ensured its southern border was Israel’s quietest. Hamas’s government in Gaza used its forces to uphold ceasefires with Israel, exposing it to claims, not least from within its own movement, that it had abandoned the founding principles of its full name, the Islamic Resistance Movement, for which hundreds of their comrades had died. It succeeded in rebutting critics who accused it of selling out by launching Palestine’s first rockets against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem after Israel killed its military leader, Ahmed Jabbari, in November 2012; it answered Israel’s bombardment with hundreds of rockets, winning domestic kudos for building a Palestinian deterrent capability. But immediately afterwards, Hamas headed to Cairo for negotiations with Israel, an act for which it had long berated Abbas. In other signs of growing accommodation, it negotiated a prisoner exchange with Israel and the easing of Israel’s siege on Gaza.

The New Old Middle East

Though in many ways the new fledging regimes replicated the old, the hubris of the Islamist revolutionaries set against the conservatism of the monarchies conjured up the geopolitical stand-off of the 1950s, when the Arab world’s new republics – with Nasser’s Egypt at the helm – waved the revolutionary flag of socialism and anti-colonialism against a bloc of reactionary royals. Like Nasser before him, Morsi sought to restore Egypt’s role as the dynamo of the Arab
world. And as their fathers before them, the Arab world’s kings rallied to resist the regional winds of change.

The two camps jostled for dominance in shaping a post-Assad Syria. The two Abdullah’s of Saudi Arabia and Jordan sought to assemble a coalition of southern tribes and Syrian army defectors trained and vetted by western and some Arab governments, who would prevent more fiery Islamists from the north backed by Turkey reaching Damascus first. Fearing that the Brotherhood was plotting to propagate its revolution in the Gulf, the UAE spearheaded a campaign against the Brotherhood, detaining members of the movement, including some of Egyptian origin, eliciting howls of official Egyptian protests. In its bid to amass an anti-Islamist centre of gravity, it hosted Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, as well as Mohammed Dahlan, Hamas’s bugbear in Gaza and former Fatah strongman, and backed Jordan’s efforts to vet and funnel arms finance by Gulf States to cooperative rebel forces.

Much of the sparring occurred on the airwaves. The Islamist republics decried the tired top-heavy systems, which sooner or later would collapse, like their autocrats, under their own weight. For their part, the monarchies peddled the benefits of stability against the bloodshed, chaos and economic recession besetting countries in the grip of transition. Both camps competed for western support. Nervous that the US might abandon them just as it had Mubarak, monarchs toured western capitals warning of the approaching Islamist winter dominated by
jihadis
who were anathema to western notions of human rights. Somewhat disingenuously, for they were no models of western values themselves, they mocked the Islamists for reversing women’s rights after their brief appearance on the revolution’s barricades. In Morocco, the representation of women fell to one in Benkirane’s cabinet from seven under his predecessor. Only 12 of Egypt’s 498 elected parliamentarians were women. Jordan’s king denounced the Brotherhood as a masonic movement set on establishing another Middle Eastern theocracy, modelled on Iran’s in Qom, and waved the standard of a counter-reformation to restore western values.

But oftentimes, the rivalries were more polemical than real – designed to shore up domestic public opinion than stoke a new bout of regional confrontation. Most monarchs were not averse to allying themselves with the Islamists at home or abroad if it furthered their interests. Saudi Arabia and Qatar had long since preceded Morocco in co-opting religious establishments – Wahhabi clerics and the Brotherhood respectively – to cement their hold. And with the new leaderships in desperate need of finance, the Gulf States saw fulsome opportunities to use their budget surpluses to exercise leverage. Gulf investors in post-Mubarak Egypt accounted for 50 percent of the country’s stock market, and their governments dangled the promise of aid topping US$20 billion. They were even more proactive in Libya. Ahead of the UN, Saudi Arabia called for international enforcement of a no-fly zone to prevent the Qaddafy regime bombing the rebels, and Qatar and Jordan offered jet fighters. At a time when the rest of the world wrung its hands in Syria, Gulf leaders extended political and military support for the rebels, and dispatched a mission which recommended regime change in Syria and elections – despite their own lack of them.

Qatar perhaps was most agile in finding new territory to promote its influence. Its unelected emir, long seen as the Arabian peninsula’s maverick, rushed to patronise the forces of regime change and champion the region’s Islamist takeovers. Qatari flags flew from Benghazi’s courthouse, the seat of Libya’s rebel government, to Gaza’s parliament building. After the Assad regime angrily expelled its former ally, Hamas leader Khalid Meshal from Syria in protest at his support for the rebels, Qatar’s leader provided him with a haven. He futher became the first Arabic leader to visit Hamas’s rulers in Gaza, and provided $400 million for reconstructing the war-ravaged enclave under Hamas rule. In so doing, he de facto recognized the Islamists, not President Abbas, as Palestine’s interlocutor. He hosted Yusuf Qaradawi, the ageing Egyptian cleric widely regarded as the Brotherhood’s spiritual guide, who in return for his government villa and salary loyally issued
fatwas
endorsing Qatar’s foreign policy. From Al Jazeera, Qatar’s satellite station, Qaradawi called on Libyans
to rise up against Qaddafy, and called on Egypt’s security forces not to open fire on civilians, while diplomatically refraining from comment on Bahrain’s suppression of Shia demonstrators. Once a respected professional and innovative satellite channel, Al Jazeera degenerated into the Brotherhood’s soapbox, inciting rebellion in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

That said, for Gulf monarchs the Arab Awakening carried an inherent risk of backfiring. Local detractors tweeted at the hypocrisy, not to mention audacity, of their support for dissent, violent overthrow and democracy in other autocracies, but repudiation of them in their own. They mocked Bahrain’s princes for hosting Syrian rebels on the podia of international conferences while barring their own Shia citizens access to the hall. Saudi Arabia, which remained probably the least democratic country in the world with not even the pretence of legislative elections, looked uneasily at the success of the new democratic strand of Salafism sweeping Egypt, fearing it might yet cast the theologies of their own sheikhs who preached the doctrine that ‘60 years under an oppressive imam are preferable to one night without one’. Perhaps to give such views a boost, it released a preacher, Suleiman al-Ulwan, in late 2012, who loyally pronounced that ‘anyone who calls for democracy does not have any concern for or will to implement Islam.’ (For good measure, he also denounced Morsi for not imposing the
jizya
, or non-Muslim tax, on Coptic Christians.)

The other regional players, the non-Arab heavyweights – Israel, Iran and Turkey – used the Arab Spring to jostle for influence. For the most part together with Arab states, they fought their struggle for regional dominance not with armies, most of which had seen little fighting in a generation, but with the supply of guns, money, media coverage, religious polemic and aid. With his defence of the Gaza-bound flotilla, for instance, Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan asserted his claim to open new maritime sea routes in the eastern Mediterranean, and possibly even to contest Israel’s claim to the giant gas fields off the east coast of Cyprus. But while deploying proxies like chess-pieces, rarely did the forces of the region’s major powers clash.