Response to Egyptian Democracy

After Egypt’s revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the most organized political party and the one most likely to resist the army’s push to regain absolute control. In order to get rid of the Brotherhood, Egyptian liberals entered into an implicit accord with the army. They calculated that, with support from the United States and the European Union, power would be transferred to them once the coup overthrew President Morsi. But the army did not deliver on its promises and instead returned Egypt to the Mubarak era, minus him and his children. The resignation of Mohamed ElBaradei, who had been appointed vice president in the aftermath of the coup, symbolized the liberals’ naiveté. When the Brotherhood was ousted from power, there was no obstacle to the army’s total control. In fact, the latest draft constitution solidifies the military’s authority.

I largely agree with Mohammad Fadel’s account of recent events in Egypt, but the opponents of political Islam he calls “liberals”—as defined by Rawls—I would instead describe as “secular fundamentalists.” I believe their mistake was not simply tactical: Egypt’s secular fundamentalists preferred the army to the Islamists. Indeed secularism as an ideology—not to be mistaken for secularization, the process whereby the religious and states realms are institutionally and normatively differentiated—views religious forces as its main enemy. Eliminating those forces is more important than democracy itself. The secularism of some Egyptian liberals resembles that of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and France’s aggressive laïcité. It is less reminiscent of what we see in the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Secular fundamentalism is in some respects incompatible with democracy. It can act as a temporary umbrella for contradictory political forces that consider political Islam their common enemy, but it does not necessarily represent the demands or interests of broad social groups (workers, teachers, capitalists, and so on). Thus it is crucial that political activists and democrats in Egypt, and more broadly in the Islamic world, clarify the relationship between secular fundamentalism, democracy, and pluralism.

According to Rawls, modern democracies are characterized by “the fact of reasonable pluralism”—the fact that citizens hold conflicting but reasonable religious and philosophical conceptions, some secular, some founded on religious texts. This pluralism of reasonable conceptions can be destroyed “only by the oppressive use of state power.” Based on reasonable pluralism, Rawls developed the notion of overlapping consensus as a way of understanding and deepening the roots of democratic systems. The idea is that citizens who affirm justice, democracy, and human rights “start from within their own comprehensive view and draw on the religious, philosophical, and moral grounds it provides.” But they are able to reach an overarching consensus in the public sphere, despite the fact that their fundamental religious and philosophical convictions are at odds. Democratization, then, is not about the victory of one comprehensive religious or philosophical outlook. It is about building a common ground for a plurality of views.

One cannot precondition acceptance of democracy on a particular outcome, such as the victory of secularists over Islamists. As the bloody civil war in Algeria demonstrated, when eliminated from the democratic process, Islamists may decide that they have no choice but to take up arms. In Egypt millions share the values of the Brotherhood and consider the party their political representative. If this fact is not acknowledged within the political process, then either the army will continue to dominate, or there will be open conflict. The victory of the secularists will not produce an Egyptian democracy.

In transitioning countries such as Egypt, a democratic state will not develop overnight. But loyalty to the democratic process, even in a political and economic system that is not completely legitimate—not a “decent society,” as Rawls put it—is preferable to the rule of generals. Secularists would do well to become more like true liberals: to spread democratic ideas, organize constituents around their vision, and transform themselves into a force that balances society and the leviathan state. Accepting pluralism is an important part of this process.