The Fortunes of Africa

SOLDIERS OF GOD

A resurgence of radical Islamism spread across northern Africa in the independence era, threatening the military-backed secular regimes that had inherited power at the end of colonial rule. The Islamic revival filled the void that followed the traumatic defeat of the Arab cause in the Six-Day War of 1967. No longer did the ideas of Pan-Arab unity and Arab socialism that Nasser espoused carry much weight. Islamic activists drew inspiration and support from the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. A growing movement in the Muslim world favoured stricter adherence to the tenets of Islam, believing that religion rather than secular ideology offered a solution to social, economic and political problems. Creeds like nationalism and socialism were condemned as godless Western imports. What mattered more than the world’s system of nation-states was the umma – the universal community of believers. Some groups advocated moving towards a Salafist version of Islam; moderate intellectuals aspired to ‘Islamise modernity’, using Islamic law and institutions as the basis of government but accepting the West’s technology and administrative skills. Small radical groups argued for jihad – armed struggle – against the enemies of Islam, including regimes in the Muslim world that they deemed to be un-Islamic, impious or apostate.

Egypt, the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood, was at the centre of this revival. An early clash occurred at the beginning of Nasser’s regime. The Muslim Brotherhood had initially welcomed the Free Officers’ coup, hoping that it would lead to Islamic rule. But when it became clear that Nasser had no intention of accommodating Islamic demands, its leaders sought to oppose him. When a member of the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to assassinate him in 1954, Nasser used the incident as a pretext to crush the entire organisation. Thousands of Brotherhood members were incarcerated in prison camps in the desert, deprived of basic necessities and subjected to brutal acts of torture. Among their number was Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s leading ideologue, who spent his years of imprisonment fashioning a revolutionary creed advocating jihad to overthrow secular regimes in the Muslim world corrupted by Western values and practices. Qutb’s jihad ideology had a profound influence on Muslim activists in north Africa and beyond.

Trained as a teacher, Qutb had once been an admirer of the West and Western literature, but he had turned into a formidable critic as a result of a two-year sojourn in the United States to study educational organisation. Appalled by what he saw as America’s moral decadence, its materialism, racism and sexual depravity, he returned to Egypt in 1951 and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, becoming its head of propaganda. Nasser tried to lure Qutb into his government, offering him a position as minister, but Qutb spurned him. Accused of involvement in the plot to assassinate Nasser, he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment.

Prison became his pulpit. Writing prolifically, he produced a vision of struggle between the true followers of Islam and the multitude of enemies they faced, including Nasser. In his most influential work, Maalim fii al-Tariq (‘Signposts along the Path’), Qutb accused Nasser and his secular government of taking Egypt back into an era of ignorance and unbelief – jahiliyya – similar to the era that had existed before the advent of Islam. According to Qutb, Nasser was not the only culprit; other governments and societies in the Muslim world were equally guilty of un-Islamic or anti-Islamic practices. Indeed, in Qutb’s view, true Muslims were a righteous minority threatened by hostile governments at every turn.

He divided Muslim societies into two diametrically opposed camps: those that belonged to the party of God and those belonging to the party of Satan. There was no middle ground. The only alternative to jahiliyya was hakimiyyat Allah – the absolute sovereignty of God – which required the imposition of Islamic law derived from the texts of the Koran and the Sunna. Muslims, said Qutb, needed to look back to the time of the Prophet and the first Salafi elders to rediscover the pure doctrines of Islam. An Islamic system of government was not just a matter of choice; it was a divine commandment.

Because of the repressive nature of un-Islamic regimes, no attempt to change them from within by using existing systems would succeed. Hence the only way to implement a new Islamic order was through jihad. Qutb urged Muslim youths to form a vanguard (talia) ready to launch a holy war against the modern jahili system and those who supported it. The only homeland a Muslim should cherish was not a piece of land but the whole Dar-al-Islam – the Abode of Islam. Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar-al-Harb – the Abode of War. Those Muslims who refused to participate or wavered were to be counted among the enemies of God.

Qutb was released from prison in 1964, but was arrested again the following year, accused of plotting to overthrow the state, largely on the basis of his own writings, and hanged in 1966. Acclaimed a martyr to the cause, he was venerated as a father-figure by Muslim extremist movements around the world. His book Signs became a bestseller and was reprinted five times.

When Nasser died from a heart attack in 1970 at the age of fiftytwo, there were genuine outpourings of grief. Four million people attended his funeral in Cairo, many feeling that Egypt had been left an orphaned nation. Yet the state he bequeathed was in dire straits. Though he remained an idol to the masses, his regime had degenerated into a personal dictatorship that stifled any hint of opposition or dissent, whether from the Muslim Brotherhood or from any other quarter. His plans to lead a socialist revolution had encumbered Egypt with a bloated public sector, huge debts, high inflation and chronic consumer shortages. Most disastrous of all was Egypt’s humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War in 1967 which resulted in Israel’s occupation of Sinai, the loss of the Sinai oilfields and the closure of the Suez Canal.

His successor, Anwar al-Sadat, a Free Officers colleague, endeavoured to escape from Nasser’s shadow and bolster his own position by cultivating the support of Islamic groups. He appropriated the title of ‘Believer-President’, arranged for the mass media to cover his prayers at mosques and began and ended his speeches with verses from the Koran. He also encouraged the growth of Islamic student associations, promoted Islamic courses in schools and reached a modus vivendi with the Muslim Brotherhood, allowing it to function publicly once more, on condition that it forswore violence.

But the rapprochement soon turned sour. The Muslim Brotherhood denounced Sadat’s ‘open-door’ economic policy – ‘infitah’ – that opened the way to market forces and brought an influx of Western businessmen. And it vilified him for signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. In protests throughout Egypt, demonstrators denounced the accord as the treasonous act of an ‘unbeliever’.

Sadat, in turn, reacted to growing opposition by resorting to authoritarian rule and outright repression. He publicly castigated the Muslim Brotherhood for abusing its newfound freedoms and warned that he would not tolerate ‘those who try to tamper with the high interests of the state under the guise of religion’. In September 1981, he ordered the arrest of more than 1,500 civic and political leaders including senior members of the Brotherhood and other Islamic activists. A few weeks later, as he was reviewing a military parade, Sadat was gunned down by army members of a jihadist group, Jamaat al-Jihad.

Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, a former air force commander, hunted down the jihadists but allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to develop as part of the mainstream of public life. In a change of strategy, the Brotherhood’s leaders began to invoke the language of democracy and human rights, transforming itself into a significant force in political, economic and social activity with the aim of converting Egypt into an Islamic state by evolutionary steps. Individual members stood for election to parliament, using the slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ and calling for the implementation of Islamic law. In 1987, Brotherhood candidates won 17 per cent of the vote and emerged as the largest opposition bloc to Mubarak’s government. The Brotherhood developed an extensive network of banks, investment houses, factories and agribusinesses. It gained control of trade unions, student groups, municipalities and several professional syndicates – lawyers, doctors, engineers and journalists. Its social service network was often far more effective than the government’s.

While the Brotherhood sought to advance the Islamic cause by mainstream methods, jihadist groups pursued their own agenda of revolutionary violence. During the 1990s, the ranks of the jihadists in Egypt were bolstered by the return of combat-hardened veterans from the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Their targets included government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians and burned Christian shops and churches. They bombed banks and government buildings and theatres, video stores and bookshops popularising Western culture. Small towns and villages as well as large cities were caught up in the violence.

Mubarak reacted to the jihadist campaign with a massive crackdown, using emergency laws to detain thousands without trial and setting up military councils to try civilians with no right of appeal. As well as targeting extremists, he took the opportunity to curb mainstream Islamic opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, insisting that it was part of the Islamist onslaught.

Mubarak’s strategy of repression largely succeeded in crushing violent Islamist opposition. But the Islamic tide nevertheless continued to rise. The revival took hold not only among the mass of impoverished Egyptians but among middle classes. Islamic institutions proliferated across the country, providing an alternative system of schools, clinics, hospitals and social welfare. Islamic values, codes of conduct and dress became part of mainstream society. Cairo, once renowned for its multicultural, cosmopolitan and secular character, took on an increasingly Islamic hue.

The military-backed regime in Algeria faced an even more formidable challenge. For more than two decades after independence from France in 1962, the military hierarchy had successfully enforced a one-party dictatorship that gave a select group of officers and business allies not only a monopoly of power but most of the wealth generated by lucrative ties and ‘trade commissions’ with foreign companies. Living in exclusive neighbourhoods high in the hills above Algiers, this rich elite came to be known simply as ‘Le Pouvoir’.

But in the bidonvilles and working-class areas below, grievances over rising unemployment, poor housing, overcrowding, consumer shortages and price rises steadily festered, culminating in 1988 in riots that spread to cities and towns across Algeria. The riots broke the mould of Algerian politics. Opting for reform rather than repression, ‘Le Pouvoir’ agreed to allow multi-party politics. Almost overnight, a host of political parties and civic groups sprang up.

Leading the pack was the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), an ambitious Islamist organisation aiming to gain power in order to transform Algeria into an Islamic state. In provincial and municipal elections in 1990, the FIS made impressive gains, winning landslide majorities in virtually all major cities. In the first round of national assembly elections in December 1991, it gained an overwhelming victory, taking 47 per cent of the vote. A second round was expected to confirm the FIS’s lead. But it never took place. In January 1992, the army command seized control, claiming that once the Islamists gained power, they could never be trusted to give it up; they were, said a spokesman, seeking ‘to use democracy in order to destroy democracy’.

The generals next set out to crush the FIS altogether, banning it as an organisation, introducing a state of emergency, detaining thousands of members in prison camps in the Sahara, removing dissident imams from mosques, shutting down newspapers and closing down town halls. The military crackdown led Algeria into a nightmare of violence. Islamist militants embarked on a campaign of assassination, bombing and sabotage intended to force the government to accept Islamist claims to power. The military retaliated with death squads, torture and ‘disappearances’. For year after year, the Islamist insurgency gripped Algeria, degenerating into indiscriminate slaughter. Both sides committed atrocities. Over a ten-year period, more than 100,000 people died.

Though the insurgency eventually lost much of its momentum, Algeria was condemned to live with a low-level conflict. The violence seemed to suit both the Islamist rebels and the military. Islamist ‘emirs’ profited heavily from extortion, protection rackets and smuggling. The military were able to justify extending the state of emergency and restricting opposition, thereby protecting the system of control that had made the ruling elite wealthy and powerful and given them all the patronage they needed to maintain their grip on power.

Sudan experienced several periods of militant Islamic rule but was eventually torn apart by it. In 1983, Sudan’s military ruler, Gaafar Numeiri, in an attempt to broaden the base of his northern support, decreed Sudan henceforth to be an Islamic republic subject to sharia law. Government officials and military commanders were required to give a pledge of allegiance to Numeiri as a Muslim ruler. In the same arbitrary manner, Numeiri dissolved the regional government of southern Sudan which had been set up under the terms of a peace agreement between the north and the south in 1972 to bring an end to ten years of civil war. The result was to provoke another round of civil war. Southern rebels called not for secession but for a united, secular Sudan, free of Islamist rule.

Assisted by zealots in the National Islamic Front, Bashir turned Sudan into a totalitarian Islamist dictatorship. One institution after another – the army, the civil service, the judiciary, the universities, trade unions and professional associations – was purged of dissent. The press was rigidly controlled. Hundreds of politicians, journalists and other professionals were detained without trial; many were tortured. A new Islamic code provided for public hanging or crucifixion for armed robbery; execution by stoning for adultery; and death for apostasy. Tight restrictions were placed on music, dancing, wedding celebrations and women’s activities. Religion became in effect a method of repression.

The war in the south was officially declared a jihad and waged with indiscriminate brutality. A fatwa issued by religious scholars in Khartoum granted conscripts sent to the south ‘the freedom of killing’. A new factor lay behind the north’s relentless assault on the south. As a result of oil discoveries in the Upper Nile region, the south had acquired a strategic significance. At a ceremony in 1999 marking the opening of a pipeline connecting the Upper Nile oilfields to the Red Sea coast, Bashir described oil exports as a reward from God for ‘Sudan’s faithfulness’. With new funds at his disposal, Bashir embarked on a massive military spending spree.

As well as enforcing their own brand of Islamic rule on Sudan, Bashir and his mentors in the National Islamic Front provided an operational base for jihadists and other militant groups in the Muslim world, inspired by the idea of establishing an ‘Islamist International’. Islamist activists from Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia were offered sanctuary and provided with diplomatic passports. Libyans trained in Sudan attempted to assassinate Gaddafi in 1993 and launched attacks in Libya in 1995. Egyptian jihadists based in Sudan tried to assassinate Mubarak in 1995 during a visit he made to Ethiopia. Eritrean insurgents used Khartoum as their headquarters. The Saudi jihadist Osama bin Laden arrived in Khartoum in 1991 and spent five years in Sudan incubating his al-Qa’eda network. Bomb attacks on United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were carried out by ‘sleeper’ cells planted by al-Qa’eda in 1994.

Denounced by African leaders and in the West as a rogue regime supporting terrorism, Bashir’s government began to change course, spurning former friends such as Osama bin Laden and other militant Islamists. In September 2001, after al-Qa’eda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Bashir, desperate to avoid retaliation, hastened to pledge cooperation with US measures aimed at al-Qa’eda and other terrorist organisations.

Under the threat of sanctions, he also became amenable to the idea of negotiating an end to the war with rebels in the south. By 2002, the war had resulted in two million people dead and four million displaced. With the United States playing a leading role as intermediary, a peace deal was signed in 2002 and finalised in 2004 according the south the right to self-determination. After a six-year interim period beginning in January 2005, southerners were to choose in a referendum whether to remain a part of a united Sudan or set up an independent state.

The gains made by rebels in the south in their dealings with Khartoum encouraged dissident groups in other parts of Sudan to press their own demands. In several areas of the north – Darfur in the west and Beja territory in the Red Sea hills – there was deep resentment of the years of neglect and indifference to local development shown by Khartoum’s ruling elite. Darfur was also beset by an age-old conflict over land between nomadic Arab pastoralists and ‘settled’ African agriculturalists. During the 1980s, as a result of drought and desertification, the conflict intensified. Arab pastoralists moved southwards from the arid north of Darfur into areas occupied by black Muslim tribes – the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa – precipitating a series of violent clashes.

Rather than working to defuse tensions, the Khartoum government sided with the Arab pastoralists, providing them with arms. When a Darfur rebel group launched its own insurgency, protesting against Khartoum’s failure to provide protection against Arab raiders and demanding a share in central government, Bashir reacted with a savage campaign of ethnic cleansing intended to drive out the local population and replace it with Arab settlers, a tactic he had used previously in southern Sudan. Arab militias known as janjaweed were licensed to kill, loot and rape at will. They burned to the ground hundreds of villages, killed thousands of tribesmen, abducted children and stole cattle. Both sides were involved in indiscriminate massacres. When United Nations agencies tried to intervene, Bashir blocked their efforts. For more than a year the killing went on unimpeded until international outrage forced Bashir to rein in the janjaweed. By 2010, it was estimated that 300,000 had died and three million been made homeless. Bashir was subsequently indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges ranging from genocide to mass murder, rape and torture.

Southern Sudan was meanwhile slipping from his grasp. In a referendum in 2011, having tasted freedom from northern rule for six years, southerners voted overwhelmingly to secede and establish an independent state. Despite oil, its prospects were pitiful. South Sudan was launched as a state with few roads, schools or health facilities, no industry, a chronic lack of skills and a government consisting of rival rebel factions that had often fought each other during thirty years of civil war.

In northern Nigeria, an upsurge in militant Islamism grew out of widespread discontent over the central government’s failure to deal with mass poverty, unemployment and crime in the region. While Nigeria’s ruling elite squandered billions of dollars on corruption and mismanagement, many regional states in the north suffered from neglect. More than two-thirds of the population there lived in abject poverty compared to one-third in the south. In the 1980s, as law enforcement disintegrated, militant Muslim groups agitated for the introduction of more stringent sharia measures. A Muslim sect led by a preacher known as ‘Maitatsine’ – ‘the one who curses’ – mobilised the young urban poor in a series of uprisings, first in Kano and later in Yola, Kaduna and Maiduguri, in which thousands died. Clashes between Muslim and Christian communities flared up time and again in Middle Belt states that straddled the divide between the Muslim north and the Christian south.

Religious tensions in the north intensified in 1999 after a Christian politician was elected as president and hundreds of northern army officers associated with the previous military regime were removed from office. Smarting from the loss of political power, northern leaders raised fears of a Christian ‘hidden agenda’ and used sharia as a weapon to reassert northern solidarity. Hitherto, about three-quarters of the northern penal code had been based on sharia law, including such matters as marriage and divorce. In 1999, the newly elected governor of Zamfara, an impoverished state in the far north, announced that the state would adopt sharia law as its sole legal system, citing Saudi Arabia as his model. Sharia law would apply to all criminal cases and to sentencing, with penalties that would include flogging and stoning. Sharia, he said, was necessary to restore clean living to a decadent society. Eleven other northern states followed Zamfara’s lead, provoking violent protests.

Several militant groups demanded further action. In 2002, a Maiduguri cleric, Mohammad Yussuf, formed Boko Haram, a Hausa name translated as meaning ‘Western education is forbidden’, seeking to establish a ‘pure’ Muslim state. In 2009, Boko Haram launched an insurgency aimed at overthrowing the federal government. Its targets included police stations, government buildings, schools and churches. It murdered moderate Muslim clerics and bombed mosques as well as attacking Christian communities. In 2010, it carried out a suicide attack on the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, the new federal capital. The federal government tried to curb the insurgency by letting loose the army. But year after year the insurgency resurfaced.

The threat posed by Islamist groups preoccupied every regime across northern Africa. But the danger they faced was overtaken in 2011 by an explosion of public anger that ignited popular revolt against the corrupt elites entrenched in power for so long.

What became known as ‘the Arab Spring’ developed from one single incident in a dusty provincial town in Tunisia. For twenty-three years, Tunisia had been ruled by Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, an avaricious dictator who used a network of family members to establish a business empire that ranged from banks, insurance companies and hotels to transport and construction firms, with an estimated value of $10 billion. In a cable to Washington, a US ambassador described how Ben Ali’s family was widely regarded as a ‘quasi-mafia’ – ‘Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or, yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumoured to covet it, and reportedly gets what it wants.’

On 17 December 2010, a 26-year-old street trader, Mohamed Bouazizi, set fire to himself outside a government building in Sidi Bouzid in protest against municipal officials who had confiscated his merchandise after accusing him of trading without a licence. Within hours of this solitary act, crowds gathered demonstrating against Ben Ali’s regime. Their protests spread like wildfire across Tunisia, fanned by social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and fuelled by years of pent-up grievances over poverty, unemployment, police brutality, rising prices, the greed of the ruling elite and the crippling lack of freedom. Police attempts at repression failed, and the army refused to intervene. After twenty-nine days of protest, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia with his family.

Inspired by Tunisia’s ‘jasmine revolution’, crowds in Egypt took to the streets calling for the overthrow of Mubarak. The protests were led initially by youth activists and students – the Facebook generation – but they were soon joined by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians of all ages, trades, classes and religions, demanding an end to his police state. After thirty years in power, Mubarak had amassed huge fortunes for himself and family members, maintaining his grip through a brutal security apparatus, while leaving most Egyptians mired in poverty.

Demonstrators seized possession of Tahrir Square in central Cairo, turning it into a hub of revolutionary fervour. Mubarak tried to crush the uprising by unleashing riot police and gangs of thugs. But the army, the ultimate arbiter of power in Egypt, soon decided he had become too much of a liability and withdrew its support. After eighteen days of protest, Mubarak was forced to stand down.

One week after Mubarak’s downfall, Libya caught fire. By 2011, Gaddafi’s dictatorship had lasted for forty-two years. He had used his control of Libya’s oil revenues to accumulate massive wealth for himself and family members, stamping out any hint of opposition or dissent along the way. His methods were ruthless. But the uprisings in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt emboldened Libyans in the eastern city of Benghazi to stage their own demonstration. Anti-Gaddafi protests spread to other towns and cities, including Tripoli. Gaddafi tried to crush the demonstrations with his customary use of brute force. Government troops opened fire indiscriminately, killing hundreds of protesters. But public fury at the massacres turned into a popular uprising. Deploying tanks, air strikes and African mercenaries, Gaddafi ordered massive reprisals; government forces, he warned, would show ‘no mercy, no pity’. As his tanks advanced on Benghazi, the UN Security Council, fearing an imminent massacre there, intervened, authorising a ‘no-fly zone’ and ‘all necessary measures’ to be taken to protect civilians. Within hours, Britain and France, supported by the United States, launched air attacks on Gaddafi’s tanks and artillery, enabling poorly equipped militias to survive. Western forces went on to bring down Gaddafi’s regime altogether, using air supremacy to destroy his military power. In August, rebel militias took control of Tripoli; in October, Gaddafi was captured and killed in the coastal town of Sirte, his last loyal redoubt.

Thus, within a matter of months in 2011, three long-standing dictatorships crumbled. But the hopes that the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring in north Africa might herald a more promising era soon began to fade.

In Tunisia, a new struggle for power developed between left-wing political activists and trade unionists insisting on secular government; moderate Islamic groups committed to a plural form of politics; and militant Islamists campaigning for an Islamic state. Under Ben Ali’s dictatorship, the mosques, imams and the sermons they preached had been controlled by the government. But in the aftermath of his downfall, Salafist clerics were quick to take command of hundreds of mosques, mounting their pulpits to attack Tunisia’s links with the West and to demand the implementation of sharia law.

In elections in 2011, a moderate Islamic party, Ennahda, gained the lead and went on to form a transitional government in coalition with secular parties. But it was slow to undertake reform of old government structures including the police and judiciary; it failed to stimulate economic growth or employment; and it allowed the Salafist movement to gather momentum. Encouraged by prominent Salafist imams, extremist groups resorted to terrorist violence. Tunisia’s political leaders expressed their determination to complete the transition to democracy but the 2011 revolution remained unfinished.

In Egypt, the military establishment allowed the window of democratic opportunity to open only briefly. After sacrificing Mubarak to quell a popular uprising, Egypt’s generals made sure they were in a position to determine the outcome of its nascent revolution. Their priority was to protect the army’s budget and its huge economic empire. For years, the military had been accustomed to operating as a state within a state. It owned banks, insurance companies, shipping lines, factories and publishing houses. It had no intention of placing any of that in jeopardy.

The military’s main challenge came from the Muslim Brotherhood. Accustomed to years of underground activity, it was better organised than any other civilian group. To survive the repression of Mubarak’s dictatorship, it had developed a centralised, hierarchical structure, reliant on secrecy and strict internal discipline with a ‘listen and obey’ credo. Its leaders were keen to push forward an Islamic agenda. ‘The Islamic reference point regulates life in its entirety, politically, economically and socially,’ said the Brotherhood’s chief strategist, Khayrat al-Shatir. ‘We don’t have this separation [between religion and government].’

Election results in January 2012 gave the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party 43 per cent of the seats in parliament and a coalition of three hardline Salafist parties 25 per cent; secular parties gained no more than 20 per cent. With a 52 per cent turnout, the parliamentary elections were generally regarded as being free and fair.

In the first round of presidential elections in May 2012, the Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, an engineer with a doctorate from the University of Southern California, took the lead with 24.7 per cent of the vote. The military’s preferred candidate, Ahmad Shafiq, a former air force commander and the last prime minister to serve under Mubarak, came second with 23.6 per cent. With no clear majority, both candidates progressed towards a second-round run-off in June.

Recognising the likelihood of a Brotherhood victory that would give it control of both parliament and the presidency, the military establishment stepped in to curb its advance. Two days before the second round took place, the ruling military council dissolved parliament after a constitutional court packed with Mubarak-era judges questioned the legality of some of the January election results. On the second day of the run-off, the military council issued a decree stripping the president of authority over matters of national defence and security, and giving senior state officials effective veto power over the provisions of a new constitution.

In the final result, announced on 24 June, Morsi took 51.7 per cent of the vote, compared to Shafiq’s 48.3 per cent, on a turnout of 52 per cent. In historical terms, Morsi’s victory was a dramatic event. It was the first time in their history that Egyptians had selected their ruler in free and fair elections. It was also the first occasion on which an Islamist had become the democratically chosen president of a modern Arab state.

There was, however, immediate friction between Morsi and the old establishment of generals, judges and officials – ‘the deep state’, as it was known. In July, when Morsi attempted to reinstate parliament, he was thwarted. In August, in a move designed to enhance his authority, Morsi engineered the replacement of Mubarak-era generals with a new generation of senior officers, appointing Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the 59-year-old head of military intelligence, as commander-in-chief and minister of defence. He also dismissed newspaper editors and judges and placed several hundred Islamists in key positions in central and local government. His actions became increasingly partisan. He made no attempt to reach out to non-Islamist groups to forge a wider consensus, and alienated Christian Copts – 10 per cent of the population – by shrugging off an invitation to attend the inauguration of a new Coptic pope.

In November, Morsi provoked uproar when he issued a decree granting himself far-reaching powers not subject to judicial review or oversight, claiming they were needed to prevent Mubarak-era judges and other officials from sabotaging the passage of a new constitution – ‘weevils eating away at the nation’. Thousands of protesters flooded into Tahrir Square, the main hub of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, clashing with Morsi’s Islamist supporters.

The process of drawing up a new constitution was already engulfed in controversy. Secular liberals and Coptic Christians pulled out of a drafting committee, protesting that the proposed constitution was weighted in favour of an Islamist agenda. Opposition leaders, youth groups and women’s organisations voiced similar alarm. Morsi ignored the protests, hastened the proceedings and announced a snap referendum, giving no more than two weeks’ notice. The referendum result, announced in December, showed that although nearly two-thirds of those voting approved the new constitution, only one-third of the electorate had participated, indicating growing disillusionment with Morsi’s regime. Protesters took to the streets once more. The military too began to stir, warning that the political crisis might lead to ‘a collapse of the state’.

As well as political turmoil, Egyptians had to contend with a shrinking economy and crumbling public services. Food prices doubled in the space of a year. Tourism, which once accounted for a tenth of economic output, plummeted. Unemployment and crime soared. Power cuts and bread queues were commonplace. In the first five months of 2013, Egypt endured some 5,000 demonstrations and increasing levels of street violence. In the face of mounting discontent, Morsi retreated to his Islamist base.

In April 2013, members of a new grassroots youth movement, Tamarod (Rebellion), launched a petition demanding Morsi’s resignation and in the following weeks collected millions of signatures. As the first anniversary of Morsi’s inauguration approached, Tamarod called for mass protests to mark the event. On 30 June, millions of Egyptians took to the streets, crowding into Tahrir Square in Cairo and rallying points in other cities.

Impatient with the growing disorder, the military establishment issued an ultimatum, warning Morsi that if he failed to find a solution to the crisis within forty-eight hours, it would intervene. When Morsi rebuffed the demand, General Sisi moved to depose him and to decapitate the Brotherhood’s leadership ranks, imprisoning hundreds of its officials. Egypt’s experiment with democratic rule had lasted but a year.

The military’s July coup was greeted with jubilation by demonstrators in Tahrir Square but elsewhere in Cairo, Morsi’s Islamist supporters set up protest camps and barricades. ‘Islam is coming,’ they shouted. ‘We will not leave.’ After weeks of deadlock, Sisi ordered a crackdown, sending security forces to crush Islamist resistance. In the ensuing massacre, more than 700 civilians were killed.

Amid continuing violence, Sisi resolved to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood once and for all, just as Nasser had done sixty years before. A concerted campaign was launched to brand Morsi’s Islamist supporters as traitors and terrorists. In September, a Cairo court banned ‘all activities’ by the Muslim Brotherhood and ordered its funds, assets and buildings to be seized. In October, Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders were put on trial on charges relating to actions taken during his presidency. In December, the Brotherhood was declared a ‘terrorist organisation’. In media outlets, Egyptians were told that only robust secular government stood in the way of an Islamist dictatorship. A personality cult blossomed around General Sisi, portraying him as the only man to save the country. The whiff of authoritarian rule grew ever stronger.

Under military auspices, a new constitution was drawn up by a fifty-member committee that included only two representatives of Islamist parties. It provided the military establishment with significant powers, including the right to appoint the defence minister; to keep the military budget secret and beyond civilian oversight; and to put civilians on trial in military courts. A massive publicity campaign was launched to secure a show of public support for the constitution in a referendum in January 2014. Few dissenting voices were heard. The referendum result showed almost total support among those who voted – 98 per cent, according to official figures – on a turnout of 38.6 per cent. Brotherhood supporters stayed away. Pleased with the outcome, General Sisi put himself forward as a candidate in presidential elections, confident of winning. Once more, Egypt passed into the hands of a military strongman.

In Libya, Gaddafi’s downfall was followed by a chaotic struggle between rival militias and a weak transitional government in Tripoli. Gaddafi’s dictatorship had ended with no functioning state institutions. The vacuum was filled by an array of armed groups, some set up by local cities and tribal leaders; some demanding autonomy for Libya’s eastern region; some controlled by jihadists; some preoccupied with smuggling and gun-running. Much of Libya collapsed into lawlessness.

The repercussions spread beyond Libya’s borders. Tuareg mercenaries from Mali whom Gaddafi had recruited to serve in his army returned home with their heavy weapons and vehicles and reignited a rebellion against the Bamako government in southern Mali. Since Mali’s independence from France in 1960, Tuareg rebels had fought several insurrections, accusing the Bamako government of neglect and misrule of the vast stretch of the Sahara they occupied and demanding a separate state they named Azawad. The epicentre of Tuareg resistance lay in a mountainous region known as the Adrar des Ifoghas, about 1,000 miles from Bamako, close to the border with Algeria.

Several other insurgent groups with different objectives were active in northern Mali. They included two homegrown Islamist groups, Ansar Dine and Mujao (Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa) which aimed to impose sharia law across the whole of Mali. Northern Mali was also used as a base by armed remnants from the insurgency in Algeria which had adopted the name Al-Qa’eda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in 2007, hoping to gain funding and credibility. AQIM specialised in kidnapping foreigners for ransom and trafficking arms, vehicles, cigarettes and drugs.

In January 2012, Tuareg rebels belonging to the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA) launched a new offensive against the Bamako government, joining forces with Ansar Dine and AQIM. The rebel advance precipitated an army mutiny at a barracks near Bamako followed by a junior officers’ coup that left Bamako in disarray. Taking advantage of the chaos, rebel groups gained control over most of northern Mali including the ancient cities of Timbuktu and Gao. The NMLA duly announced that it had secured all the territory it wanted and declared independence from Mali.

But the rebel alliance soon fell apart. Hoisting the black flag of al-Qa’eda, the jihadists rapidly enforced sharia law, arresting men for smoking, demanding women veil their faces, closing nightclubs, banning music, inflicting harsh punishments, at every turn alienating the local population accustomed to the tolerant practices of Sufi Islam. ‘They have imposed a kind of religion on us we have never seen,’ a Timbuktu merchant told journalists after fleeing the town. ‘You can’t even walk with your wife. We’re like prisoners.’ A renowned Malian singer, Khaira Arby, known as ‘the Nightingale of the North’, was forced to flee from her home in Timbuktu after Ansar Dine threatened to cut out her tongue. ‘We do not want Satan’s music,’ a spokesman explained.

In June, the jihadists turned on Tuareg separatists, driving them out of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. Using picks and shovels, they wrecked the tombs and mausoleums of several venerated Sufi saints, claiming they were ‘idolatrous’, and smashed the sacred door of the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahia mosque. Fearing for the fate of thousands of rare manuscripts and books held in government libraries and in private collections, many dating back to the medieval era, local custodians and scholars began to ferry them surreptitiously to hiding places, often at great risk.

When jihadists advanced into southern Mali in January 2013, France came to the rescue of the Bamako regime, sending forces to crush the northern insurrection. As French troops approached Timbuktu, in a last act of vandalism, jihadists set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute, a library and research centre named after a seventeenth-century scholar, housing some 20,000 ancient texts. Timbuktu lost several thousand documents during the insurrection but the vast bulk of its heritage was preserved through the courage of local citizens.