From the Democratiya Archives: An Interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim

From the Democratiya Archives: An Interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim

From the Democratiya Archives: An Interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim

Today marks the third day of large anti-Mubarak protests across Egypt, inspired in part by the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. Tomorrow may bring the biggest protests yet, and the first ones with the full support of the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the New York Times, the Brotherhood promises to join ?with all the national Egyptian forces, the Egyptian people, so that this coming Friday will be the general day of rage for the Egyptian nation.?

Four years ago, Alan Johnson conducted an interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo and prominent advocate of democracy and human rights in the Arab world, who was imprisoned from 2000 to 2003 for “tarnishing” Egypt’s reputation. Ibrahim addressed the possibility of an alliance between members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian democrats. Below is an excerpt from that interview. (Read the whole thing here.)

***

Alan Johnson: You have argued for an alliance of sorts between democrats and ?moderate? Islamists. In August 2006 you wrote that ?Mainstream Islamists with broad support developed civic dispositions and services to provide are the most likely actors in building a new Middle East.? And in December 2006 you complained about an ?unjustified fear of modern Islamists? and called for a policy of dialogue and inclusion, saying ?Hamas, Hezbollah, Muslim Brothers ? these people you cannot get rid of; you have to deal with them ? the name of the game is inclusion.? You deny that these organisations are inimical to democracy, pointing out that Islamists have never come to power via elections and then reneged on democracy. Warning that ?the Islamist scare is propagated and marketed by autocratic regimes to intimidate the middle class and the West, to ward off any serious democratic reforms,? you have urged a positive response to Hamas and Hezbollah?s participation in elections. While you warn that ?no sober analyst would consider this a final commitment by Islamists to democracy,? you believe ?the process of transforming them into Muslim democrats is clearly under way.? Now, these views have raised some eyebrows. Can you set out your thinking?

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: After 9/11 ? at the same time as I was being pressured by Gamal al-Banna to launch a project for an Islamic Reformation ? I was engaging the Islamists in prison. Everyone was shaken up by 9/11 and so open to discussion. On my release, the comrades of these Islamists contacted me and proposed we continue the dialogue. We did for a few months and then one asked a question ? why has the outside world raised such a fuss about you and not about our comrades, even though they have been rotting for 25 years? They asked why the BBC talked about my case but not theirs. I reminded them that I was perceived as sharing core values with human rights groups around the world. They asked what these core values were. I told them: belief in democracy, freedom, human rights, equality, tolerance, diversity. They claimed to share those values. I said, ?Have you guys forgotten that I studied you 25 years ago? You did not have those values then!? They claimed to have changed in prison, having rethought their ideas. I said: well, your image is still one of bloodthirsty, violent, intolerant fanatics. They asked how they could change their image. I told them: the same way you created it, by your actions and rhetoric and writings. They claimed to feel morally responsible for what happened on 9/11. I said: begin to write in a different way. They wrote four small volumes revisiting their beliefs, and these were smuggled out of prison and published. These were published under the name El Moragiat which in Arabic means the revisiting or the revising.

The Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers held a press conference on March 30, 2004, fully supporting democracy. Of course there remain doubts about whether they are really committed. But at another level they do seem to have moved. I am optimistic. I say we should give Islamists a chance to show whether they are truly committed to these core values or not. There is nothing to lose. Instead of a bloodbath every generation, let us see if they can evolve.

What helped me in this dialogue with the Islamists, inside prison and outside, was the assumption of power by the Justice and Development Party in Turkey towards the end of 2002, and the similar development in Morocco. That gave the dialogue credence and reminded me that Islamists are not metaphysical abstractions but human beings in time and space ? historic forces subject to change like everybody else. They are not beyond change or reform.

Alan Johnson: But what of the danger of an Iranian development? Did the Iranian left not commit a grievous error in making that kind of alliance, literally digging its own grave? How can that be avoided?

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: Well, this is the question that is raised all the time. Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan are cases in which Islamists came to power not through the ballot box but through a coup or a revolution. But when Islamists were given the chance via the ballot box they have not reneged on the rules. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Turkey, and other countries, Islamists who came to power through the ballot box left power through the ballot box. Look, I am as concerned as you are, being a secularist and a civil society advocate. I hear your question ? if they come to power will it be ?one man, one vote, one time,? or will they leave office if voted out by the majority? But I would like to keep that question alive, as an open question.

[….]

Alan Johnson: Some of your most important writings have highlighted the symbiotic nature of the relationship between autocracy and theocracy. You have written that, ?So long as the entrenched autocrats of the Muslim world continue to deny their peoples equal rights of participation, there will always be disaffected dissidents who may resort to extreme ideologies and violent practices. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries excluded Muslims rallied to theocrats ? bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and al-Zarqawi ? to combat the autocrats ? Mubarak, Assad, Fahd, and Musharraf. The autocrats and theocrats are mirror-images: both are exclusive.? In what sense is the autocrat-theocrat relationship ?symbiotic? and what are the political implications of this?

Saad Eddin Ibrahim: The public space is absolutely dominated by autocrats who have been entrenched for 50 years, and theocrats who have been challenging the autocrats for the last 30 years ? since the Iranian revolution. The small reviving constituency of the democrats is totally outmatched. Yes, I say the autocrats need the theocrats. How so? Well, the autocrats skilfully and cynically use the theocrats as a bogeyman to frighten not only the West but also their own middle classes and non-Muslim minorities. The autocrats believe that if they can continue to confront the west and their own people with a stark choice ? the theocrats or us ? then their power is secure. In Egypt in 2005, 77 percent of the registered voters abstained because they did not want either the autocrats or the theocrats. The regime had destroyed the democratic middle ground that could have galvanised the voters. Ayman Nour who leads a liberal democratic party called Al Ghad was arrested in 2005 and has just completed his two years in prison.

In 2006 the West got scared of democracy-promotion because of the election of Hamas and the Muslim Brothers winning 88 seats ? one-fifth of the Egyptian Parliament. Mubarak used this result to argue that democracy was being pushed too fast. We democrats must respond by pointing out that Islamists will get 20-25 percent of the vote in free elections, at least for the foreseeable future. Fear of the Islamists can?t be used to block democracy for the rest. And if the Islamists get 45 percent of the vote and form a government then we democrats have to have confidence that they will discover the world is not black and white, that they too can be pressured, and they too will have to compromise. I am not worried about that. I am worried when the West swallows uncritically what the autocrats say. The real antidote to the symbiotic relationship between autocracy and theocracy is a politics of inclusion and democratic governance. When Muslims join the third wave of democracy that started in Portugal in 1974, al Qaeda will join al-Hashashin in the dustbin of history.