Scores of Egyptians were killed in violent street battles over the past few days. Many more will probably die as the partisans of either side harden their barricades and prepare for a long confrontation.
The revolution that began with mass protests that ousted the Mubarak regime three years ago continues to be shaped in the streets. The contending forces are unyielding. This is a war between Egypt’s past and Egypt’s future.
Earlier this month, after weeks of street protests, the Egyptian military intervened. Muhamad Morsi, the first Egyptian leader freely elected by his people since the dawn of this 4,000 year-old society, was removed from his post in what most of the world saw as a coup. Morsi was thrown out of power exactly a year after he assumed the post.
Denying this was a military take-over, the army high command quickly installed the head of the constitutional court as interim president and promised elections as well as a new constitution at the soonest feasible time. The army leadership imagined this would be a short intervention, a brief foray into a messy political situation, to set things on a more stable course.
It was certainly easy to depose Morsi. The unarmed civilian government was defenseless against an armed forces held in high esteem by the Egyptian people. When all the chips are down, the Egyptian army will always be the last functioning institution is this deeply polarized society. No piece of paper will be more willful than hundreds of tanks rolling down Cairo’s streets.
But the army high command now appears to have seriously underestimated the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive movement Morsi represents. The Brotherhood, it is now clear, will not yield too easily.
The Brotherhood, since it was founded over eighty years ago, endured long periods of brutal persecution. For many years, it was a banned organization. Its leaders were frequently arrested and tortured.
When elections were held last year, however, the Brotherhood proved to be a potent grassroots organization. In free elections, the movement managed to install their representative to the presidency, outflanking the fractious liberal parties and the remnants of the Mubarak regime.
The Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood are natural enemies.
In the tradition of the Turkish colonels, the “Young Turks†commanded by Ataturk, who mounted a coup in their country and dismantled the Ottoman institutions, the Egyptian military saw its role as a modernizing force in society. Modernization in this context meant not only demolishing the medieval aristocracy but also carving a secular space for the state, free from the influence of Islamists.
Recall that the Ottoman empire, which controlled much of the Middle East before the entry of European colonialism, guised itself as the caliphate, the unitary and authoritative structure ruling the entire world of Islam. Ataturk, and later the various Baathists parties the surfaced in the Arab world (spawning the tyrannies of Mubarak, Hussein and Assad), saw themselves as the negation of Islamist rule.
The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, represents the Islamist reaction to the secular drift exemplified by the modernizing military regimes. They hold on to the classical idea that for authoritative rule to be virtuous, it must be enlightened by Islam.
The dogma that animates the Brotherhood invited profound suspicion from the liberals the moment Morsi took power. They examined his every move, seeing signs of a degeneration of the revolution into something that approximates Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
Morsi did not disappoint them. He introduced a constitution that underplayed civil rights and the status of women. He seemed more interested in renovating institutions to conform to the Sharia ideals than he was with fixing a seriously decrepit economy. As the first anniversary of his presidency approached, people poured into the streets demanding his resignation.
A brutal war of attrition is now in progress in the streets of Cairo. It is a war between the social forces of the past and those of the future.
The army detained Morsi and several other leaders of the Brotherhood. Soon they will face charges for an assortment of crimes ranging from involvement in murder to treason.
Something a lot more than formal occupation of the institutions of power needs to be resolved here, however. Egypt is now a deeply polarized society. That polarization will not be relieved overnight.
So it is that in Cairo there are now two semi-permanent encampments. The liberal and secular forces are encamped at historic Tahrir Square, where the large demonstrations that overthrew Mubarak happened. At the Nasr district, around an old mosque, the pro-Morsi forces are encamped.
In no other instance has a polarized society been so vividly demonstrated, the contending forces clearly encamped in separate districts of a single city, in the separate imaginations of a single nation.
The army obviously sides with the forces encamped at Tahrir Square. These are the forces that imagine an Egypt that is secular and where individual freedoms are protected.
The forces of the Brotherhood, as they have been for the most part of the last century, have been the object of violent attacks. They have taken casualties from gunfire coming their way. But they will not be easily uprooted.
Until these two encampments somehow dissipate, it will be hard to imagine any progress in the transition plan offered by the army, a plan resolutely rejected by the Brotherhood. Unless some transition begins progressing out of this polarized condition, all Egyptians will suffer from the economic fallout of many years of turbulence.