Many think the revolution ended in 2013, when the military took over (yeah, we will come to that). Some think that it ended before that, when Islamists got hold of the country in 2012 (I promise we will get to that too!). In my opinion, the revolution ended only nine weeks after Mubarak stepped down.
Mubarak’s rule was centered on one principal message: “Either me or absolute chaos.” He made everyone believe that if he stepped down Islamist extremists would win over Egypt and create another Afghanistan. This wasn’t new; throughout the Arab world military dictators used this message as a tool to stay in power. This is why Western powers had no problem with Mubarak or other military leaders or dictators in the Middle East. For them, the likes of Mubarak represented “stability,” which is another word for taking care of America’s interests in a discreet way without having to deal with public outcry. It’s similar to the way America supported many dictators in Latin America to protect its interests from communists. That’s why Castro was a real mind fucker: he was both a dictator and a communist.
For Mubarak to maintain his position as the “only” option, he had to destroy any liberal or moderate opposition while keeping Islamic political power on a tight leash, and, as such, there was no other alternative in case of his departure than bringing in Islamists.
Mubarak officially stepped down on February 11, 2011, at which point the army took over for an interim rule and promised to hold elections the next year. But the army decided to quickly push a referendum vote on March 19. On the surface, they made it look like the people were being given an opportunity to choose how the presidential office and constitution would operate moving forward. Quite simply, though, the referendum fucked up the beautiful mosaic that was the revolution. It showed the ugly face of political Islam and alienated many people from the idea of democracy.
However, I really can’t go on explaining why Egypt is such a clusterfuck without explaining what the hell Sharia Law is or who makes up the various Islamist parties. So get ready for the worst explanation of political Islam and Sharia you may ever encounter. It may not be good enough to help you pass your Middle Eastern politics class, but it’ll do just fine for telling off your ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving.
In my futile attempt to explain political Islam I will have to use the word Sharia a lot. Now, if you think you know what the hell it is, think again. We Muslims—all one and a half billion of us—have yet to really agree on what this word means.
A very stripped-down explanation is that Sharia is a collection of rules and laws that are inspired by the Quran. It includes the stories and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, in addition to many rulings on Islamic law and interpretations from what theologists concluded after the Prophet.
For most people, their daily lives are dictated by Sharia and how it outlines the honorable way to approach issues like marriage, inheritance, charity donations, prayer, dietary rules such as abstaining from drinking or eating pork and making sure that the meat you eat is halal (kosher), and how not to be an asshole. Other followers extend Sharia to mandate how women should dress, the length of a man’s beard, and how to be a real asshole to other “followers” whom they deem less religious.
Many take it even further and consider Sharia to be the undisputed law of God—including every single literal order and mandate of Sharia that has been in place for hundreds of years. They have taken ahold of Sharia’s dogma by denying any attempts or interpretations to modernize the traditions. This is akin to applying the Bible’s Old Testament as it was written. Could you imagine if your current boss forced all female employees to work in a completely separate office while they were menstruating because they were too “unclean” to mingle with men? How about stoning to death or beheading kids who cursed at their parents?
There are about fifty countries in the world with Muslim majorities. Many of them have Sharia Law as part of their constitution. And yet not everyone follows the literal or the most extreme interpretations. If you surveyed Muslims, the majority will say they prefer operating under Sharia Law, but this doesn’t mean they would want to live under ISIS or al-Qaeda, which allegedly follows the most extreme interpretations. Just like many Americans could agree to live by the spirit of the Ten Commandments, but wouldn’t want to take the religious right’s doctrine as national law.
What makes it confusing is that different groups of people choose whatever interpretation fits them best. Which interpretation wins out really depends on who has the power and the money to impose it. The Saudis are rich and have a lot of money to spread around, so their interpretation, the most extreme, Wahhabism one, takes all the marbles.
I once had a heated discussion with a pro-Sharia Islamic scholar. He claimed that there is nothing wrong with Sharia, and that we as Muslims should apply the best possible version. I asked him which Sharia he wants to apply. Which Islamic country now or even in the past fifteen hundred years applied the best version of Sharia? And which religious scholars should carry that task? The ones in Saudi Arabia? The ones in Egypt? The ones in Iran? Indonesia, Malaysia, Algeria, Morocco? Which ones? He failed to answer.
If you go back to the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, the scary image of terrorist Muslims shouting “Sharia” is nowhere to be found. So how did that fucked-up version make a comeback?
America’s archenemies, the Taliban, were on America’s good side when the CIA was funding and arming them to beat the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Even Hollywood loved the mujahideen guerrilla militia types. That was obvious in Rambo 3. Do you remember this movie? It’s so bad, it’s good. It’s where your all-American hero goes to Afghanistan to help the heroic mujahideen against the horrible, good-for-nuthin’ Ruskies. A few years later, the real Soviet Union suddenly collapsed and the American media needed a scarecrow, and we stepped in to fill the gap. News agencies, you’re welcome!
Okay. So, as I was saying, for decades the worst and most extreme interpretation of Sharia was fueled by Saudi money and their Wahhabi ideology. America goes along with it as long as they pump out the oil as fast as they pump the hate. But to be fair, it’s not just Saudi Arabia. Many of the military regimes in the region love Sharia. You can’t drive the masses with guns and tanks forever so you need a more spiritual controlling tool: the Good God Himself.
Sadat, our president before Mubarak, changed the constitution in 1980 to give himself unlimited presidential terms. And to pass this statute he also had to make a drastic change in the constitution to appease the Muslim majority. He tweaked the Sharia article in the constitution to state that instead of “Sharia is a source of legislation,” “Sharia is the source of legislation.” It is a wonder how a couple of letters can fuck a whole country.
A few months later he was assassinated during a victory parade, and Mubarak later took full advantage of the unlimited-terms article, allowing the Sharia clause to remain.
Now, Egypt’s law doesn’t allow beheadings, the removal of limbs, or the enforcement of many of the Wahhabi interpretations. But, when needed this article can be used to oppress free thinkers, minorities, or anything that is considered a threat.
The military would use Sharia to show that they are the guardians of religion and at the same time would let extreme radicals talk freely about their dream to apply an ISIS-like Sharia to scare everyone. It was the good old “it’s either me or chaos/terrorism/Jihad/etc.” line.
Most people (including authorities) who identify as Islamists and who call for Sharia and “God’s rule” are fucking hypocrites. An Arab philosopher once said, “If Muslims were given a choice to vote for either a secular or a religious state they would vote for the religious state and flee to live in the secular one.” We are too afraid of some ephemeral God to vote in our own self-interest.
With this horrible and confusing explanation of one of the most used and abused words in today’s Islamic discourse, now let’s ask the next impossible-to-answer question: What the hell is political Islam?
It is true that my story is about comedy and satire and how it managed to equally offend everyone in the middle of political turmoil. But I really can’t tell the story without giving you a background of the key players in this region. Let’s be real: If I started to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood and how they came to power and the jokes I made about them, you won’t really get it if you don’t know who the hell the Muslim Brotherhood are. It would be like making fun of the inane “Mexicans are all rapists and thieves” comment without explaining to a non-American the Dumpster fire that is Donald Trump.
Let’s just start with the word Islamist. What is the difference between this word and Muslim?
Muslim refers to someone who belongs to the Islamic religion. That’s easy. Islamist, on the other hand, describes someone or a group of people who use the religion as part of their political doctrine. You could be Muslim like me but hate the Islamists. There are two main subgroups in Egypt that fall under the Islamist category: the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. When I use the word Islamist it will probably mean both of these groups, or those who belong to that camp of political Islam.
Good luck with that.
Now, let’s move on . . .
The Muslim Brotherhood are by far the most important player when it comes to political Islam in Egypt. The Brotherhood began in the 1920s as a social movement that encouraged people to “get back to Islam” and be better Muslims, but soon developed into a political movement. There are all kinds of books and studies about the Muslim Brotherhood that describe their ideologies, rules, and social impact, so if you want a deeper look at their history, drop this book right now and get one of those boring books written by some scholar in Washington. I don’t do fair political analysis.
I like to think of them as a cult-like group. (See? This is political science through feelings and impressions!) The Brotherhood has their own Joseph Smith–like character who founded the group in the 1920s, whom they don’t think of as a prophet or anything, but whom they quote sometimes more than the Prophet Muhammad. They think of themselves as better than everyone else because they alone know what “true Islam is.” Isn’t that too familiar? Basically, they are the kids in class sitting in the first row sucking up to the teachers by reminding them to give the class more homework. I know, bunch of dicks, right?
Throughout their history, the Brotherhood had a habit of boot-kissing the authorities in order to push a religious narrative to the masses, and then finding themselves getting screwed by it. When Egypt had a king, the Brotherhood leaders were always on his side when he opposed the liberal opposition. Then, as the king grew uncomfortable with them, he ordered the assassination of their “Joseph Smith.” When Nasser came to power in 1952, the Brotherhood applauded him for crushing the workers’ strikes and other political players, but their leaders ended up in Nasser’s prisons, and some were even executed. Consider it a thank-you note from Nasser for all their hard work. During Mubarak’s era, the Brotherhood’s youth came out from universities to chant against Israeli occupation and advocate for the boycotting of American goods, but they would stifle chants coming from non-Brotherhood members who verbally assaulted Mubarak.
This was the same Mubarak who would again send many of their leaders to prison and allow some of them to run for parliament. Crazy, right? The sadomasochistic relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military makes Fifty Shades of Grey look like a nursery rhyme.
After the January 25 revolution, the Brotherhood were the military’s bitches—in bed with them and applauding the military defamation of liberal opposition. That is until the military kicked the Brotherhood out of their bed and into the prisons (as we will see later).
The Muslim Brotherhood used the slogan “Islam is the solution,” which was like a magical potion for their political campaign. They were evangelists for bringing back the Islamic caliphate (essentially an area that is ruled by a “chosen” religious leader, or caliph). People really bought into that. There is hardly a Muslim kid who didn’t have his dream of dominating the world again and people converting to Islam right, left, and center. In the past few years since the Brotherhood came to power and started to impose their thinking, people in Egypt looked more into our history and read more about that caliphate. They found out that the utopian picture we had about our Islamic history is not entirely true. It was a history of colonization and wars, with bright spots of civilization as well as many dark moments of human stupidity. Really, the caliphate was like any other culture or empire and, more important, a far cry from the “divine” image Islamists loved to spread.
The Brotherhood managed to present themselves as the educated, modern Muslims of the moderate and non-violent variety. Although they may dress and appear nicer than your everyday ISIS-like radical Islamists, their history and continued shady behavior proved they still had a fucked-up mentality.
The other major player in our history and election was the Salafis, who are the real radical Islamists. If the Muslim Brotherhood were Southern Baptists, the Salafis were the Westboro Baptist Church. They took extremism to a whole new level.
The modern Salafi movement of Egypt began in the 1970s, when Sadat (our president before Mubarak) encouraged Islamic factions to come back to power in order to counteract the rising leftist youth movement in universities. He called himself the “pious” president—making it easier for him to pose as a divinely led leader. With more Egyptians finding work in Saudi Arabia and with the huge funding of the Saudi government, the Salafi movement found a place in Egypt.
Salafis were used like puppets by the military regimes to pacify the public. The more religious the people were, the more politically apathetic they would become. And since the Salafi sheikhs were under the control of the Egyptian equivalent of the NSA, Egyptian citizens were strategically pushed away from the intellectual and political sphere and into religious states that viewed the world as a dirty, unholy place. And when everyone is high on religion it’s pretty easy to make them believe just about anything.
Side note: The word sheikh in Arabic literally means “old man.” However, it is used in a multitude of ways. Most commonly it means men who are dedicated to teaching or preaching theology (the equivalent of a priest or a reverend). However, they come in many shapes and forms, and in the Middle East we are cursed with the worst kind of scumbags who use religion for political and power gains. In this book you will meet a lot of them.
The Egyptian regime during Mubarak made perfect use of this tool. They had home-grown many of the Salafis or reimported the Egyptian sheikhs who had gone to Saudi Arabia. They were the best weapon against the Muslim Brotherhood. You would think that both would work together, right? Islamists are all the same, right? Oh, hell no!
During Mubarak’s reign, the Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood hated each other. As mentioned before, Salafi sheikhs were under the control of the Egyptian NSA. The Salafis promoted the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood was an abomination to Islam because it was a political faction. After the revolution those barriers fell and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis somehow came to work together as one front. Nothing could bring two right-wing groups together quite like the common belief that no person should ever experience the freedom of thought.
I watched that transformation take place firsthand. My online videos were making me a bit more famous, and different political powers started approaching me because, I guess, they thought it was good to be on the side of a comedian. I would meet young, educated men from the Muslim Brotherhood who, in their perfect English, would tell me about how open-minded they were. It was obvious they had received their education at American universities, and they wanted to ease my worry about the supposed “Islamic tsunami” that was coming.
“Don’t listen to the media,” the Brotherhood members would tell me. “It’s a new era, we really should all work together for a better future and coexistence.”
The very next day their leaders would hold a joint rally with the Salafis in some poor neighborhood where they would announce that “the only way to govern is through Sharia law.”
I would call the guy I was just sitting with the day before and would ask how he had justified that change of heart.
“It was taken out of context,” he would answer.
Out of context, my ass!
We started to hear a whole new tone in the Brotherhood media. There were now channels dedicated solely to Islamist content. This in itself was not new; we had religious channels for years before that. But two things had happened: now those channels had primarily political agendas, and there were far too many of them.
Watching these channels, I felt as if the 700 Club and Fox News had merged to create a super-right-wing politico-religious Transformer. It was like a Sean Hannity wet dream come true, only with a different religion.
After a revolution that called for democracy, it was strange to hear people talking about democracy as a filthy by-product of the infidel West. “Unchecked democracy is haram,” some of the Islamist leaders would announce. Haram means “forbidden” in Arabic.
The Salafi sheikhs were the first to go up against the revolution and issue fatwas declaring that what was happening in Tahrir was haram. Fatwas are rulings on Islamic law as determined by established leaders. Basically, it’s like when you’re playing a game and some jerk decides to reinterpret the rules right in the middle so he can win. One of the most famous fatwas used was: “It is forbidden to go out and topple the ruler because this will lead to chaos.” And as we all know, God hates chaos.
But now the road was wide open for those Salafis to assume power, albeit with a dilemma. The revolution is haram but because of it, the people are free to elect a leader. How could the Salafis tell their followers to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood as political partners after issuing conflicting fatwas against them?
Well, the beautiful thing about fatwas is that they can be tailor-made. Every sheikh has his own supermarket of fatwas that allows him to justify and even reverse previous positions. So if you took this mentality and had followers who were willing to believe whatever bullshit you tell them, it is easy to assert that politics is no longer haram. The revolution is not haram either. The liberal youth were merely a tool to push the Salafi vision. Due to the results of the revolution coupled with their new political power, the Salafis could finally create their coveted Islamic State. The Muslim Brotherhood should no longer be seen as an abomination, but as the Salafis’ brothers who could help achieve that goal.
After the fall of Mubarak, those two wings marked the beginning of the decline of the revolution toward Islamic fundamentalism. But to achieve their goals the Islamists needed a defining battle, an epic victory, or quite simply a referendum.