Islamist surge is unstoppable, says Egypt’s history book

During the years when Abdel Gamal Nasser was in power, which he assumed by placing his predecessor Muhammad Naguib under house arrest, he would sweep elections with 95% of the vote.

Nasser may have had little time for parliamentary niceties but he needed to go through the motions of holding elections to maintain the facade of Egypt being ruled through popular will and not despotic dictatorship.

Given Nasser’s amazing popularity and the fact that he lived in the era of raging Arab nationalism — to which he contributed in no small measure — he need not have slyly instructed the stuffing of ballot boxes. But Arab rulers aren’t expected to take chances; Nasser may have been adventurous abroad, albeit with disastrous consequences, but he was a cautious man at home.

After the votes were counted and tallied, Nasser wo-uld thank his people and praise their wisdom. And wonder aloud why five per cent Egyptians were unhappy with him. It would be more of a complaint than an expression of concern.

Nasser was succeeded by Anwar Sadat who simply ignored what people thought of him: Had he been sensitive to popular opinion, he would have neither booted out the Soviet ‘advisers’ who crowded Cairo during Nasser’s time nor thrown open Egypt’s doors to the Americans.

More importantly, he wouldn’t have dared sign the Camp David Accord of 1978 and the peace agreement with Israel a year later, thus becoming the first Arab leader to recognise the Jewish state and establish diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. Sadat paid for this indifference with his life: He was assassinated, in full public view during the October 6 parade in 1981, by a group of Islamists in the Army led by Khalid Islambouli.

Hosni Mubarak, who narrowly escaped death on that fateful day, wrought venge-ance like a pharaoh in implacable rage.

The assassin and his co-conspirators were executed; tough Emergency laws were imposed; an elaborate security apparatus was devised; and, the mukha-barat, or secret police, the mainstay of Arab regimes, strengthened.

Admirers of Mubarak, of whom there are still many in Egypt, believe the president wanted to avenge the death of Sadat who had appointed him his second-in-command, thus ensuring his succession to the throne. It was a declaration of loyalty to the assassinated leader.

But Mubarak’s critics, of whom too there are many (as the protests which began on January 25 demonstrate) insist he was mortified by the possibility of meeting Sadat’s fate.

Hence his ruthless extermination of Islamists who had infiltrated the system, including the Army, and struck roots in Egyptian society at large. The Muslim Brotherhood, long banned, faced the full fury of the state.

Apocryphal stories abound how he instructed the mukhabarat to raze a poor, largely slum-dominated, neighbourhood of fashionable Zamalek when Islamists declared the setting up of the ‘Islamic Republic of Imbaba’.

Mubarak continued to sweep elections, but with a lesser margin: His NDP got 85 per cent of the vote in last winter’s parliamentary election. He didn’t complain about 15 per cent not voting for his party, but believed it would be seen as evidence of the elections being free and fair. That, of course, was far from the truth.

If Nasser had ballot boxes stuffed as a measure of ample precaution, Mubarak had to do so out of necessity. As the 2005 election showed, any degree of free polling would lead to the Muslim Brotherhood gaining parliamentary space and political legitimacy.

The Ikhwan won 88 seats in 2005 (its candidates contested as ‘Independents’); it boycotted the 2010 poll because of the regime’s crackdown. Even a quasi-free election would have seen the Muslim Brotherhood winning nearly half, if not more, of the 444 seats that are open to contest.

Mubarak may have staved off the Ikhwan’s march temporarily, but an Islamist surge is now unstoppable. Whenever fresh elections are held, the Ikhwan will emerge as the single largest group, if not the victor.

That, and not the hullabaloo at Tahrir Square, will mark the end of the Nasser-Sadat-Mubarak era. It will also see a tectonic shift in Egypt’s relationship with the world on either side of Suez, beginning with Israel.

It’s a future fraught with frightening possibilities, never mind the politically-correct bunk-um that we are getting to hear and read courtesy Al Jazeera and the lib-left media.

Nasser had seen into the future and sought to remorselessly stamp out the Muslim Brotherhood: He sent its ideologue Sayiid Qutb to the gallows and outlawed the organisation. Sadat flirted with the Ikhwan on the sly, hoping to tame its leaders.

It proved to be a star-crossed affair. Mubarak cracked down on the Brotherhood and forced it to the margins of Egyptian polity but couldn’t stop Egyptian society from being seduced by the charms of radical Islamism. Qutb had also seen the future, as had Hasan-al Banna before him.

It’s easy to scoff at Ayatollah Khamenei’s comment, but he is just being blunt when he says the world is witnessing an “Islamic wave”. How we deal with it is an entirely different issue.