Now six years since the popular uprising that ended the regime of longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, many have argued that the liberatory sentiment that stoked the Tahrir Revolution in the first place is barely recognizable. Following a year of the admittedly incompetent rule of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammad Morsi, the second uprising in July 2013 that brought down his rule ultimately gave rise to precisely the kind of authoritarianism Egyptian revolutionaries had been railing against in January 2011. Encapsulated most vividly by the Egyptian security forces’ calculated slaughter of protesters on August 14, 2013 in Cairo’s Rabaa Square,1 the Egyptian police state has returned with a vengeance. Under the stewardship of (now) President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, state repression has been escalated to levels hitherto unimaginable even during the Mubarak years, with not only suspected members of the Brotherhood, but Egyptian civil society more broadly, now subject to sweeping crackdowns.

As a preface, we cannot sufficiently emphasize that the ouster of Morsi was decidedly a popular coup. Even if the Tamarod (Rebel) movement that initially spearheaded the insurrection against Morsi in June 2013 ultimately exaggerated its claims to have collected twenty-two million signatures in opposition to Morsi’s presidency, anti-Morsi sentiment in the months leading up to the June 30, 2013 uprising was deeply palpable. A sizeable constituency of the Egyptian public had indeed grown increasingly disillusioned with Morsi as their first elected leader, and feared his stewardship of the country now stood to violate the ideals of the uprising they had valiantly spearheaded in January 2011. Even the very revolutionary forces that were so instrumental in the fall of Mubarak concurred: major players in Egyptian civil society, including groups like Kifaya and the April 6th Youth Movement that played such a dominant role in the January 2011 uprising, had initially lent their support to the Tamarod campaign and its demand for early presidential elections.2 In the face of such deep-seated anti-Morsi and anti-Brotherhood sentiment having permeated large contingents of Egyptian society, it is not altogether surprising that masses would enthusiastically cheer on the forcible removal of Morsi by the Egyptian military on July 3, 2013, or even then General Sisi’s call later that month for a full “mandate” from the Egyptian people to combat terrorism – and thus embark on a systematic crackdown against Islamists tout court.3

Nonetheless, even if popular dissatisfaction with Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood can conceivably excuse a critical mass of the Egyptian public for having lent its support to the early termination of the democratic experiment in Egypt, it does not sufficiently explain why a key contingent of Egypt’s liberals succumbed to the same fate. Which is to say, an influential coterie of Egyptian liberal activists and intellectuals, who had earned their reputations as scions of protest and champions of democracy, civil society, and human rights during the Mubarak years, ultimately reneged on those commitments in the aftermath of the events of June 2013 and onward. Departing from their previous personas, these heretofore liberal figures instead lent support – in many cases enthusiastic support – to the new authoritarian order under President Sisi. All hail from different and varying perspectives, but are united by having been self-identified as liberal, secular democrats, and rather iconic figures of the idea of secular liberalism in Egypt more broadly. Yet paradoxically, these same figures came to enthusiastically support the coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, and to continue that wave of support well into the point at which the new order under Sisi’s rampant illiberal repression – against Muslim Brotherhood supporters and beyond – was made readily apparent.

Briefly, before fully proceeding, we should clarify what we mean here by ‘liberal.’ Here we rely primarily on the benchmark of self-identification, but even then, what is the ‘liberalism’ to which Egyptian figures under consideration subscribe? Broadly speaking, these figures employ the term to refer to a political philosophy more immediately rooted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Incubated in the context of feudalism and the arbitrary abuse of power by clerical authorities, liberalism as articulated by its most luminary figures such as John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others, articulated a worldview in which individual freedom became sacrosanct:

[They] envisioned a new world in which the arbitrary authority of the church and an arrogant aristocracy would cease to exist; a world in which reason and democracy would temper provincial ethnic and religious hatreds between states and races; a world of unfettered freedom, without radical differences in the distribution of wealth, in which an individual might better his lot through hard work and without fear of obstruction by the state.4

The individual thus became central to the liberal worldview, as a subject endowed with inviolable rights, and whose freedoms were to be protected at all costs, be it against the fetters of religious dogmatism or the invasive proclivities of the state apparatus. We will speak more about the history of liberalism as a philosophy in a subsequent section, but for now it should suffice to highlight its most salient attributes, in order to understand how the project reconstituted itself in Egypt, outside the immediately European cultural context in which it was originally conceived.

And in the Egyptian context, it is important to first preface that the liberals who form the basis of this study were not mere armchair intellectuals or fair-weather political activists. Figures of the persuasion we consider here had legitimately paid their dues in the pre-revolutionary context, many having faced serious persecution under Mubarak for their efforts at promoting democracy and the liberal rule of law. The prominent Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa is a case in point: long a thorn in the side of the Mubarak regime, as editor of the opposition newspaper al-Dustour, Eissa was regularly harassed by the Egyptian courts for publishing allegedly subversive commentary – perhaps most famously in 2007, in which his article questioning then president Mubarak’s failing health earned him a year-long prison sentence. Insinuating that the Egyptian president had health problems, the charges against him stipulated, was tantamount to harming national security.5 Similarly, democracy and civil society activist Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been no stranger to the travesty of Egyptian justice, having spent several years languishing in Mubarak’s prisons on the dubious charge of defaming Egypt through his advocacy work at the Cairo-based democracy think tank he had founded, the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.6 The famed Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany and founder of the March 9th Movement for University Independence Dr. Mohammad Abol Ghar also fall into this cadre of liberal reformers: Aswany was a founding member of the Kifaya, Egyptian Movement for Change, protest movement, while Abol Ghar served as a spokesman for the National Association for Change led by Mohamed El Baradei, and following the 2011 revolution co-founded the Social Democratic Party, “what many viewed as the most substantial political party for liberals.”7

During their pre-revolutionary political careers, moreover, these liberal figures were quite nuanced in how they handled their associations with the Muslim Brotherhood. As avowedly secular figures, none was remotely sympathetic to Islamism as a political platform, but their opposition to the discourse of Islamism did not preclude them from accepting the Brotherhood as a reality in Egyptian political life. Ibrahim Eissa is perhaps more contentious than most liberals in this respect, having had a palpably antagonistic relationship with the role of religion in society even in his earlier career. As early as the nineties, Eissa published critiques of religious discourse, both in his expository writing in columns and books, as well as in a series of novels. But even then, as editor of al-Dustour, he allowed Muslim Brotherhood figures the opportunity to publish in his pages, and defended the group against state suppression. Arguing that the Brotherhood was “representative of Egypt’s class and cultural map,” in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 uprising, Eissa celebrated their electoral wins, declaring as recently as October 2011 that “[i]f millions of Egyptian voters were to give the Muslim Brotherhood the majority in the elections...this would be majorly and abundantly beneficial.”8 Thus, as much opprobrium as Eissa may have heaped on Islamism as an ideological discourse, he nonetheless respected the Brotherhood’s role in Egyptian civil society.

Other liberals were even more forthcoming in their defense of the Brotherhood as a legitimate political force. Alaa al-Aswany in his pre-revolutionary writings stressed national unity despite ideological differences with the Brotherhood, reiterating in a column dated August 9, 2009, that it was the Mubarak regime that “has deliberately exaggerated the role and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood for use as a bogeyman against anyone who calls for democracy.”9 Even if the Brotherhood were to win fair elections, he maintained in a November 8, 2009 column, “wouldn’t that be the free choice of Egyptians, which we should respect if we are true democrats?”10 As for Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, perhaps the defining aspect of his career both as a sociologist and as a democracy activist has been his long-standing commitment to the domestication of the Brotherhood. The quintessential Arab democrat, having refined his ideas on Islamist domestication through time spent with Brotherhood figures while in prison, Ibrahim has consistently maintained that allowing Islamists entry into the democratic process would liberalize their movement in the long term. Shortly after the 2011 revolution, Ibrahim analogized the Brotherhood to the Christian Democrats of Western Europe, arguing that “[t]hey started with more Christianity than democracy 100 years ago. Now they are more democracy than Christianity.”11

Yet once the Muslim Brotherhood successfully entered the political arena, culminating in the election of Mohammad Morsi in June of 2012, these same figures radically shifted gears in their hitherto firm commitment to democratic reform. For all his bravado about considering a Brotherhood win in a fair election “majorly and abundantly beneficial,” Ibrahim Eissa ultimately proved unwilling to abide by his own dictum. His journalistic work now degenerated from cutting-edge dissident commentary to sycophantic pro-military propaganda, Eissa firmly backed the overthrow of Morsi on the paranoid premise that, as he lamented in a conversation with Negar Azimi of the New Yorker, “[w]e don’t want to turn into Iran.”12 Elsewhere, in an interview Eissa expresses no sympathy for protesters who support the Brotherhood – an oblique reference to protesters massacred in Rabaa and al-Nahda squares – stating “[t]here is no such things as rights for terrorists[.]”13

So profound was his descent from being a champion of liberal values to his new persona as a political reactionary, Eissa went as far as to applaud the arrest of the April 6th Youth Movement founder Ahmed Maher, questioning the movement’s patriotism. The very political movement that played a defining role in the overthrow of Mubarak, Eissa now maintains, is so insufficiently loyal to Egypt as to warrant its founder languishing in prison for the next three years. Maher eventually responded, penning a bitter letter from prison to his erstwhile ally and comrade in the revolution: “Addressed to ‘Hima,’ the affectionate nickname activists used to have for Eissa, the letter states: ‘He says that we are wavering, even though our positions are constant and his change every few months. Not only his positions – Eissa’s core values change, his principles and convictions.’”14

Other liberal figures in this vein similarly followed suit. Alaa al-Aswany’s ballyhooed portrayals of then General Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi as “a national hero” were matched only by his disdain for the Brotherhood, as he revealed in conversation with the New Yorker: “They are like a bad version of Don Quixote because they live in history. They believe they were chosen by God to restore the glory of their religion. This type of fascism is very, very dangerous!”15 Not to be outdone in braggadocio on behalf of the counterrevolutionary regime, Mohammad Abol Ghar unreservedly justified this circumvention of the democratic process by invoking alleged corollaries in American history: “‘Would the Americans have been willing to wait four years for Nixon to finish his term?’ Aboul-Ghar asked...‘And remember, Nixon did much less than Morsi did.’”16

And as for Saad Eddin Ibrahim, even the Arab world’s arguably most prominent democrat, who only years earlier had aggressively lobbied on Capitol Hill to convince American lawmakers to force the Mubarak regime to grant political space for the Brotherhood, ultimately capitulated to lend his enthusiastic support to the overthrow of Morsi, going so far as to support then General Sisi’s presidential ambitions. Ibrahim proved wholly unapologetic for this seeming about-face, citing that experience has matured his political thinking: “I have no regrets whatsoever,” said the seventy-five-year-old director of the Ibn Khaldun Center – which has backed democracy since he founded the group in 1988 – of his advocacy for the once powerful Islamist group he now opposes. “My perspective evolved.”17

Interestingly enough, though, in the years following the events of July 2013, several of these same liberal figures have increasingly backtracked from or made concessions to their otherwise stalwart support of the military establishment. In the case of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, it seems that he has had a bona fide change of heart; in an interview in November 2015, Ibrahim adopts a style far more reminiscent of his pre-2013 persona, now urging the Sisi regime to reconcile with the Muslim Brotherhood, emphasizing that “[t]he state should embrace these people one way or another. They are political cadres, and are not ignorant. Conflict with them will exhaust resources and shed the blood of citizens. It threatens us with a civil war and therefore reconciling with the Brotherhood is a must before matters develop into what is worst.”18

Similarly, Alaa al-Aswany has become increasingly critical of the Sisi regime in his writings, to the point that the state has censored both his public seminars in Cairo and his writings in state-run media. Yet Aswany has been more reserved than Ibrahim, maintaining that he continues to support the state’s “fight against terrorism,” with the caveat that this does not justify dictatorship.19 If Aswany’s case is any indication, liberal support for the military apparatus is no guarantee of immunity against that apparatus turning its guns on its very enablers – a fate that has also recently befallen Ibrahim Eissa, who in early January 2016 was under criminal investigation by Egyptian prosecutors for allegedly insulting the judiciary in an article published in the Al-Maqal newspaper he edits.20 Now cognizant of his own vulnerability, even as a stalwart supporter who initially hailed Sisi’s rise as “a day of joy, a day of victory, a day of dignity, a day of pride, the day Egypt and its people were victorious,” Eissa has since begun to more directly challenge his erstwhile hero: “What happened exactly to make our nation turn around with you to the ear of searching consciences, putting minds on trial and imprisoning writers and authors?”21

Still, other liberal figures have been less sanguine, having held firm in their belief that the existential threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and by “terrorism,” nebulously defined, necessitates the current regime’s crackdown on Egyptian civil society. On this, Mohammad Abol Ghar is quite forthcoming, declaring in a November 2015 interview that all Egyptians are united behind the state, and that the democratic process can and should allow the Egyptian people the right to curtail rights and freedoms as the national interest dictates:

Democracy means communal participation in decision-making, which is different from talking about ‘rights and freedoms.’ And if democracy is achieved, then the Egyptian masses [have the prerogative to] decide at a certain moment that we cannot grant freedoms one hundred percent in the name of [achieving] the national interest, as circumstances require.22

More recently, in March 2016, Abol Ghar authored a column lamenting the state of the country, in which he goes as far as to accuse Sisi of presiding over a broken political process, and over a police force that cavalierly beats and tortures. But his ire here directed at his former “Redeemer and Savior” is largely economic, decrying the devaluation of the Egyptian pound in contradistinction to the dollar, and Sisi’s recklessness in commissioning large projects (ostensibly referring to the Suez Canal expansion) without having done the due diligence to assess their economic viability.23 While Abol Ghar does offer some interspersed critiques of political repression, the tenor of his missive here suggests that, per his December 2015 article, circumscribing political freedoms would nonetheless still qualify as within the ambit of national interest, were Sisi’s repressive rule to have brought economic prosperity to the country. Only in the face of the threat of economic failure, and the concomitant departure of foreign companies and international credit lines, does Abol Ghar begin to reconsider his commitments to political and intellectual freedom – and by extension, to the core vision undergirding the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and to the principles that he himself articulated in his advocacy for academic freedom through the March 9th Movement for University Independence, and in his work as spokesman for the National Association for Change alongside El Baradei.

What happened, then, to the liberal experiment in Egypt? How could intellectuals and activists so demonstrably committed to the cause of civil society, freedom, and democracy in Egypt – indeed, to the very impulses that inspired the 2011 uprising – come to abandon those commitments? How could the guardians of liberal values in Egypt ultimately embolden the nation’s recidivism into authoritarian rule? Or, put another way, how could liberals in Egypt ultimately give rise to outright illiberal proclivities? It is this question that Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism seeks to critically address.

Having said that, doing full justice to the issue of Egypt and the contradictions of liberalism requires a systematic approach that goes beyond the career of this or that contemporary liberal figure. Liberalism in Egypt was and remains part of a deep historical trajectory stretching back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which produced an intellectual and philosophical legacy that continues to inform even the liberals of today. Moreover, the key intellectuals and activists associated with early Egyptian liberalism attempted to cement their political project through the cultivation of liberal institutions, the legacy of which bears direct ramifications for the failures of the contemporary liberal project. Thus, to fully disentangle the illiberal proclivities of modern Egyptian liberalism, we must situate it in the intellectual history of the Egyptian liberal tradition more broadly, and, equally important, with the institutional legacy that tradition produced. It is to this question that we shall now turn.

THE GENEALOGIES OF EGYPTIAN LIBERALISM

In May 2003, two months after officially being cleared by the Egyptian Court of Cassation of all charges against him and subsequently released from prison, Saad Eddin Ibrahim spoke at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington DC about his experiences under incarceration. Despite having languished in Mubarak’s prisons to the point that his health had been irreparably damaged, Ibrahim delivered a message of optimism, assuring his audience that a democratic Egypt was wholly within the realm of possibility – because Egyptian society had an immanent tradition that articulated precisely the values of freedom and justice on which a democratic order is ultimately based. Referring to the Liberal Age – a term he borrows from the intellectual historian Albert Hourani 24 – Ibrahim harkens back to a period of nascent intellectual freedom and prosperity in Egypt stretching from, by his chronology, 1850 until its untimely demise with the rise of Nasser in 1952. Despite its early termination, Ibrahim maintains that the Liberal Age planted the seeds for the cultivation of democratic governance and a robust civil society in Egypt. Reviving this immanent discourse of the Liberal Age, then, is Ibrahim’s solution to the authoritarian impasse facing Egypt:

When we founded the Ibn Khaldun Center and as we guided its work throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, we had the Liberal Age very much in mind. We saw ourselves not as builders from scratch, but as revivers of a great (but not perfect) tradition that had existed not only in our own country but also in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, and elsewhere. We were and remain determined that this liberal tradition – and the Egyptian Court of Cassation, as witnessed in our legal case, is part of this legacy – will not be forgotten. We believe that if these ideas receive the exposure they deserve, the memory of this tradition and, more importantly, the still-living relevance of its core teachings on rights, freedom, transparency, and justice can play a large role in showing that democracy does indeed have a reasonable chance of putting down roots and growing in the Middle East.25

The Liberal Age began as part of a broader movement known as the Arab Renaissance, or the Nahda, largely in response to European material ascendancy over Muslim lands. Initially, the Nahda gave rise to a form of Islamic liberalism, with figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) and Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) seeking to reorient the Islamic tradition to its rationalist roots, thus making Islam more congruent with the needs of the modern world. Islamic liberalism then gave rise to a “humanist liberalism,” built on largely European auspices.26 Many leading early liberals like Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (d. 1963), Taha Husayn (d. 1973), and others began as students of Abduh on the one hand, and went on to study in Europe on the other hand. For whatever the divergences in their positions, a critical mass of this early generation of Egyptian liberals were formatively shaped by insights they acquired in Europe: Taha Husayn went so far as to insist that “[i]n order to become equal partners in civilization with the Europeans, we must literally and forthrightly do everything that they do.”27 It is under these auspices, having imbibed the tenets of liberal philosophy in Europe, that liberal thinkers in Egypt attempted to forge a new vision for an Egyptian consciousness, as the basis for what became early Egyptian territorial nationalism. It is this vision, moreover, that Ibrahim is seeking to revive as a basis of democratic reform.

Given the centrality of European liberal thought to the Egyptian encounter with liberalism, moreover, it behooves us to briefly consider the experience of liberalism in Western history, in order to do full justice to the Egyptian Liberal Age it helped inspire. Again, liberalism as a political philosophy ultimately ascribed primacy to the individual against the caprices of the arbitrary exercise of power, namely from feudal authorities on the one hand and an overzealous church on the other. Early liberal thinkers thus grounded the political community they envisioned not in some placation to history, myth, or religious dogma, but instead to universal values predicated on reason, that “made certain abstract assumptions about human nature, linked them with the interests that might bring individuals together in a political community, and drew the institutional consequences.”28

For Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), these liberal universals were articulated through a hypothetical “state of nature” that otherwise sought to wreak havoc on the lives of individuals caught in its crosshairs. As rational actors interested in self-preservation, Hobbes maintained, individuals would willingly surrender autonomy to a powerful sovereign, which would in turn be tasked with ensuring the safety necessary for the individuals under its stewardship, such that they can properly maximize their own liberties unencumbered by the threat of the ongoing anarchy of the state of nature. The sovereign for Hobbes is depersonalized, such that public existence is made wholly distinct from private existence: “The state stands over and apart from the personal interests defining civil society while law becomes external to the individuals who make up the community.”29 The depersonalized state, thus, can serve as an impartial arbiter of grievances and disputes among individuals, who are all (de jure) equal before a liberal rule of law applied uniformly to each constituent of the political community.

The dilemma in Hobbes’s vision was that it gave rise to absolutism; his understanding of sovereignty was so all-encompassing that he opposed the ability of individual liberal subjects to make claims against the state. Put another way, Hobbes’s sovereign was one largely unencumbered by accountability to the individuals under its jurisdiction, so long as it continued to fulfill its perfunctory obligation to guarantee their immediate safety. John Locke (d. 1704) recalibrated the liberal community to ground citizenship not on self-preservation, but on property rights; so long as citizenship was based on property, he surmised, individuals as rational actors would largely go about their business, and through self-interest would maximize their own liberties. The state’s sovereignty, then, would be circumscribed, engaging only in central administration while leaving private interests governed by civil society otherwise unhindered.

Moreover, Locke saw the sovereign as accountable to the governed, through an emphasis on constitutionalism and legislature clearly delineating equality under the law and formal recognition of reciprocity. The liberal rule of law, as envisioned by Locke, was not a tool of constraint, but one operating in the preservation of freedom, which “anchors the particular, protects the exercise of ‘difference,’ rather than serves as the justification for squashing it.”30 This concern with the protection of difference is perhaps most palpable in Locke’s famous Letter on Toleration (1690), in which he emphasizes religious tolerance as the only prudent option available in light of sectarianism produced by the Protestant Reformation on the one hand, and the dogmatism of the Catholic Church on the other.

The liberal vision, as articulated by its key theorists such as Locke, was predicated on “the moral responsibility of the individual for his or her fate, the radical implications of the division between church and state, and the insistence that the grievances of the weak and exploited demand the institutional possibility of redress.”31 That said, the blueprint for this formula was certainly recalibrated with each passing generation of liberal theorists – T. H. Green (d. 1882), in contradistinction to figures like Locke, saw a role for state intervention in the advancement of liberty, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778) grounded citizenship not in property rights but on what he termed the “general will,” to name a few tangents on which the liberal vision has traversed. But these broader commitments, to the advancement of the liberty of the individual, to an articulation of state sovereignty specifically as a means of preserving individual liberty, and to the rule of law, have continued to play a formative role in the liberal worldview. And it is precisely these commitments, as Saad Eddin Ibrahim articulates, that helped inform the Liberal Age in Egypt.

Two of Ibrahim’s observations here prove especially salient. First, the Liberal Age left behind an inheritance of ideas, replete with “core teachings on rights, freedom, transparency, and justice.” Perhaps most central to that intellectual legacy, for our purposes, was a commitment to secularism. Keeping in mind the centrality of the separation of religion and the state in the European liberal worldview – owing in large part to the environment of religious sectarianism in which figures like John Locke immediately found themselves – it makes perfect sense that Egyptian figures deeply informed by European liberal thought would adopt a similar attitude toward religion. Thus, relying on antecedents in European liberal philosophy, major figures of the early Liberal Age largely rejected religion as a legitimate basis of political action. Figures like Lutfi al-Sayyid were quite obstinate in this respect, explicitly seeking to delink the Egyptian nationalist movement from the Arab and Islamic intellectual heritage altogether; this militant strand of secularism in early Egyptian liberal thought ultimately coalesced in the revival of Pharaonism as the basis of Egyptian territorial nationalism – which also served as a basis of situating Egypt as a legitimate heir to Western civilization, given ancient Egypt’s connections to the Hellenic world.32

Having said that, this rigid commitment to secularism should not be viewed as a purely uninterrupted linear development in Egyptian liberalism. Indeed, as much as figures like Lutfi al-Sayyid wholly excised religion from their political project, contemporaneous Egyptian figures associated with the Liberal Age like Qasim Amin (d. 1908), Huda Sha‘rawi (d. 1947), Saad Zaghlul (d. 1927), and others attempted to articulate campaigns of some kind of liberal reform, while giving at least a perfunctory acknowledgment to Egypt’s Arab and Islamic heritage. Others conceived their political projects under explicitly secular auspices, to later incorporate Islamic themes (Islamiyyat) into their writings – most famously Muhammad Husayn Haykal (d. 1956).33 Moreover, subsequent generations of liberals proved more ambitious than their predecessors in this respect, with liberals of the generation following 1967 having been willing to actively engage rather than cavalierly elide the Arab-Islamic heritage (turath): “In contrast to the earlier liberal writers, their defiant discourse sought the deconstruction of Islamic tradition and the establishment of a dynamic civic polity by focusing explicitly on the core of Muslim consciousness – the Qur’an – and transforming it from a divine and legal text into a more historical text.”34

Suffice to say, rather than constituting a narrow linear trajectory, Egyptian liberalism’s relationship with religion has evolved with each passing generation. Nonetheless, liberalism in Egypt from its early antecedents to the present has remained largely committed to some understanding of secularism – which by extension deeply informs liberal antagonism toward Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood. To be fair, some of these fears were well founded, as liberal figures did indeed find themselves caught in Islamist crosshairs throughout modern Egyptian history – the murder of Egyptian secularist Farag Foda in 1992 by members of al-Gama‘aa al-Islamiyya would be a case in point. But what is especially germane for our purposes in this discussion is that the early Liberal Age’s commitments to wholly excising religion from public life continued to play a palpable role in informing the acrimonious relationship contemporary liberal figures in Egypt have tended to have with Islamists – even despite scions of the broader European liberal tradition such as Locke emphasizing the protection of difference through religious tolerance.

The second of Ibrahim’s insights here that prove formative to our analysis is the centrality of institutions as part of the legacy of the Liberal Age. Much like John Locke and other European liberals who stressed constitutionalism and a transparent legislative process, Ibrahim recognizes the necessity to ground Egyptian liberalism in tangible institutional structures and processes. He refers to the Egyptian Court of Cassation, which ultimately granted him his freedom, as emblematic of the liberal tradition. That court was part of a broader attempt by early liberals to indigenize their liberal project through a palpable institutional presence, central to which is an independent liberal judiciary. Similarly, the Liberal Age witnessed the establishment of liberal political parties, most notably Lutfi al-Sayyid’s Umma Party in 1907, the leadership of which went on to form the Wafd Party in 1919.

Moreover, in addition to investing in structures of the state, early liberal figures were central to the cultivation of an Egyptian civil society, through which the tensions between state and society could ultimately be self-regulating. Education, in particular, was considered central to the liberal project, not only as a means of discursive instruction but also “a vital part in teaching the civic virtues and creating the conditions in which a democratic government can exist.”35 Recognizing the potential of the Egyptian educational system as a locus by which the liberal project can permeate Egyptian society, Taha Husayn and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid worked assiduously in education reform, to the extent that both men ultimately served as Ministers of Education. Education aside, the media was a central outlet for the cultivation of civil society during the Liberal Age. The Egyptian press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed one of its most creative periods, with the establishment of Al-Ahram (1876), al-Muqattam (1889), al-Muqtataf (1884), and others. In particular, the Umma Party’s newspaper Al-Jarida, under the leadership of Lutfi al-Sayyid, was perhaps the most formative organ for molding the first generation of early liberal thinkers, to the extent that he would be affectionately referred to as the ustadh al-jil, or teacher of the generation.

Additionally, liberal thought became institutionalized through think tanks and non-governmental organizations advocating liberal policy reform. The Society of National Renaissance (Jama‘at al-Nahda al-Qawmiyya) – founded in part by Lutfi al-Sayyid – was a case in point, particularly through the person of Merrit Butrus Ghali (d. 1991), whose key text The Policy of Tomorrow formed the basis of the Society’s program of liberal political and agrarian reform.36 Moreover, the Society came to have a considerable impact on Egyptian liberal journalism; under the editorship of Zaki Abd al-Qadir, its monthly publication al-Fusul would serve as the clearinghouse for the next generation of prominent liberal journalists, who would later acquire fame as leading opinion makers in Ruz al-Yusuf – a journal that under the leadership of Ihsan Abd al-Quddus (d. 1991) “became one of the strongest forces for liberal and socialist reform in the 1950s.”37

And this institutional legacy continued to have an impact on subsequent generations of Egyptian liberals, to the present. Indeed, it is no accident that Ibrahim Eissa began his career in the nineties at Ruz al-Yusuf, even decades following its establishment considered “one of the country’s oldest, most prestigious papers at the time, known as a school for liberal intellectuals and artists.”38 As for the legacy of liberal think tanks and NGOs, Saad Eddin Ibrahim’s Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies is modeled on precisely these auspices laid out by earlier generations of liberal thinkers. And with respect to education, Mohammad Abol Ghar founded his March 9th Movement for University Independence with the Liberal Age quite literally in mind, having selected the namesake precisely to coincide with the date in 1932 in which Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid resigned from his post as rector of the Egyptian University (since renamed Cairo University) in protest at the Wafdist Ministry of Education censorial decree to remove Taha Husayn as Dean of Arts.39 Much like Husayn before him, who viewed the university in particular as a forum that must remain wholly independent in order to cultivate a fully autonomous intellectual community,40 Abol Ghar’s initiative was designed specifically “to defend academic freedom and to protect universities from the intervention of state security agencies, as well as academic corruption and discrimination.”41 His decision to co-found the Social Democratic Party following the 2011 revolution, moreover, is a further testament to the institutional legacy of the early Liberal Age on contemporary liberals.

Addressing the failures of the contemporary liberal project in Egypt, then, necessitates being acutely aware of both the intellectual and the institutional legacy of the early Liberal Age from which it derives. Put another way, addressing the contradictions of liberalism in Egypt requires that we take into account the distinctly Egyptian institutional, social, and intellectual context in which the liberal experiment operates. We have arranged the volume accordingly.

STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT

We begin the book with Section I, which deals with the issue of liberalism and the Egyptian state. Chapter 2 by Dalia Fahmy addresses the structural illiberalism of Egyptian party politics, as evidenced most recently by the fecklessness of the new spate of liberal and leftist parties to emerge following 2011 as robust opposition blocs to counter the praetorian state. Mohammad Abol Ghar’s Social Democratic Party, and its failure to make any meaningful electoral gains, would be a case in point of this phenomenon.

Similarly, Chapter 3 by Hesham Sallam deals with the issue of structural constraints from the perspective of socialist-leaning leftist currents in Egypt, and how the institutional legacies of the Nasser and Sadat eras have come to bear on how those movements engage with Islamist currents. State interventions during the 1960s and 70s, Sallam maintains, created an asymmetrical playing field between leftist and Islamist currents that ultimately made credible pact-making between the two highly tenuous at best; the willingness of leftist and liberal actors in endorsing the military ouster of Morsi in 2013, then, is a testament to the enduring character of that legacy. Finally, Sahar Aziz continues this thread, and closes this section, in Chapter 4 by emphasizing the structural illiberalism of the Egyptian judiciary and its role in circumventing revolutionary changes to governance following the January 25, 2011 uprising. Particularly during the last decade of Mubarak’s rule, the Egyptian judiciary was increasingly disentangled from its nineteenth-century liberal roots; this deliberalization of the judiciary ultimately gave rise to a court-centered counterrevolution, which began the very day Hosni Mubarak stepped down on February 11, 2011.

Section II continues to analyze liberalism from an institutional perspective, but shifts gears to address civil society. In Chapter 5, Ann Lesch analyzes the difficulties facing the NGO community in the context of the authoritarian state’s effort to monopolize the religious and moral spheres and control public space. NGOs are viewed with suspicion, along with the press, social media, universities, independent trade unions, and independent political movements. Despite the severe crackdown, courageous human rights groups seek to defend citizens’ rights and press to implement constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.42 In Chapter 6, Mohamad Elmasry addresses civil society through the prism of the media. The illiberal turn of Ibrahim Eissa, for instance, is not an entirely isolated phenomenon, but is indicative of the Egyptian media’s broader failure as a truly liberal institution. Analyzing the trajectory of the Egyptian media and political discourse in the lead up to and aftermath of July 3, 2013, Elmasry argues that the Egyptian press constructed a hegemonic discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood and of then President Mohammad Morsi as not simply incompetent but as a sinister and existential threat to the wholesomeness of Egyptian society. This hysterical caricature, Elmasry submits, provided the necessarily ammunition for public support not only of the coup, but also of the violent elimination of the Muslim Brotherhood from public and private life post-coup.

Finally, in Chapter 7, Abdel-Fattah Mady closes this section on liberalism and civil society, by investigating the role of the Egyptian student movement as a purveyor of progressive political change, from the early twentieth century to the present. Given the emphasis by liberal figures from Taha Husayn to Mohammad Abol Ghar most recently on the centrality of the role of education to disseminate liberal values – and by extension on the preservation of university independence under those auspices – it is unsurprising that university activism has played such a demonstrable role as a site of civic debate and protest. In examining university activism from its auspices to the current crackdown on student movements under the rule of Sisi, Mady concludes with implications for the future role of student activism in the preservation of civil society, and the cultivation of bona fide democratic alternatives in Egyptian political and civic life.

Now moving on from an institutional to an ideological analysis of the liberal project, Section III shifts gears by considering the place of religion, and by extension of secularism, in the liberal imagination. In Chapter 8, Khaled Abou El Fadl addresses the role of secularized intelligentsia in Egypt as a self-appointed avant garde tasked with leading their society toward progress and away from cultural backwardness and reactionary religious sentiment. Armed with a distinctly Western epistemological framework, the secular intelligentsia from the colonial period onward has relied excessively on the repressive apparatus of the praetorian state to maintain its privileged status in Egyptian society on the one hand, and to stave off the putative threat of Islamism on the other. Its support of the 2013 coup, Abou El Fadl argues, is yet the latest manifestation of that paradigm in action.

Building on this theme, Ahmed Abdel Meguid and Daanish Faruqi argue in Chapter 9 that Egyptian liberals, for all their claims to be diametrically opposed to the Islamist project on the basis of secular ideals, nonetheless coalesce with their very adversaries on one fundamental basis: both a distinct current of the Egyptian liberal project on the one hand, and of the Muslim Brotherhood experiment on the other hand, ground the polities they envision in an all-encompassing inviolable sovereign conception of the state, that becomes the sole and ultimate arbiter of the Egyptian social contract. This ideological statist posturing is paradoxical, moreover, both to liberalism’s ostensible emphasis on individual liberties and personal autonomy, as well as the largely decentralized model of governance typical of medieval Islamic society. Ultimately, Abdel Meguid and Faruqi argue, the chauvinism of the Muslim Brotherhood while in office, as well as the intransigence of Egyptian liberals in giving rise to a military-led counterrevolution and the consequent abortion of the democratic experiment in Egypt, directly result from the ideological statism embedded in both political projects.

In Section IV, we end the volume with analyses of Egyptian liberals in comparative perspective in the aftermath of the events of 2013. In Chapter 10, Emran El-Badawi juxtaposes the career of famed Egyptian literary critic Gaber Asfour against that of exiled Syrian liberal academic Burhan Ghalioun, and the role both played as secular liberal intellectuals and political activists in the Arab Spring uprisings in their respective nations. In detailing Asfour’s having succumbed to being coopted by the military autocracy, and Ghalioun opting for overseas mobilization as the first chair of the Syrian National Council (SNC) –only for its lack of strategy and internal fractiousness to necessitate his resignation – El-Badawi attempts to articulate the limitations of Arab liberalism, “the seeds of which were sown by their literati ancestors two centuries ago.”

In Chapter 11, Joel Gordon continues with another comparative analysis, this time juxtaposing Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef with novelist and activist Alaa al-Aswany. Attempting to situate contemporary Egyptian liberal thought into a broader historical trajectory, Gordon puts both figures in conversation with Western orientalist readings of early twentieth-century Egyptian liberalism, which described efforts by early liberals like Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal to incorporate religious themes and Islamic history (Islamiyyat) into their liberal project as indicative of an insidious “crisis of orientation”43 – a rigid secular-religious binary that was thoroughly criticized by later generations of scholars. As evidenced by the work of Youssef and Aswany, Gordon argues for an emergence of a new “crisis of orientation,” in which leading liberal voices in Egypt have seemingly embraced this very binary of secular progress versus religious reaction, while playing a major role in the divisive politics that characterized politics in the period of the January 2011 uprising and the July 2013 ouster of Mohammad Morsi. This new crisis in turn led many secular liberals, facing the alleged threat of ‘Brotherhoodization’ to a reactionary embrace of the ancien régime.

We close this section with a unique vista into the Egyptian liberal predicament, by one of its most luminary representatives.44 Alongside Hossam Bahgat, Amr Hamzawy has the honor of having been deemed one of “the only [two] true liberals in Egypt” by Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations.45 Indeed, he has earned the distinction, as perhaps the only prominent liberal in Egypt to condemn the military ouster of Morsi and the subsequent crackdown of civil society, going so far as having “called the celebration of the military takeover ‘fascism under the false pretense of democracy and liberalism.’”46 Previously subjected to a travel ban for his outspoken criticism of the military regime, Hamzawy has since left Egypt altogether, now serving as a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

In Chapter 12, Hamzawy diagnoses Egyptian liberals as having internalized a series of anti-democratic deceptions that in turn emboldened them to support the military incursion into the democratic process. From sequentialism, the idea that democracy requires a series of incremental prerequisites, to the nebulous notion of national necessity, to the subordination of society and citizens to the state, these anti-democratic deceptions by Egypt’s liberals in turn made it feasible for the return of a military strongman to terminate Egypt’s short-lived democratic experiment.

Finally, we bring the volume to a close with an equally illuminating insider account of the liberal predicament in Egypt. A professor of political science at the American University in Cairo and a staunch opponent of the July 3, 2013 military coup, Emad El-Din Shahin’s role as one of Egypt’s public intellectuals was tragically compromised by a politically motivated case brought against him in January 2014. Accused of espionage, of leading and offering material support to an illegal organization, and of harming national unity, among a litany of equally dubious charges, Shahin was tried in absentia and was summarily sentenced to death in May 2015. Shahin has since sought academic exile in the United States, and is presently serving as the Hasib Sabbagh Distinguished Visiting Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University.

In his conclusion, Shahin takes stock of the totality of critiques of Egyptian liberalism articulated throughout this volume, and tries to offer a series of proposals on how liberalism can overcome its present impasse. Rather than cynically dismissing Egyptian liberalism as an abject failure, he insists that Egypt needs a robust liberalism with long-term viability. Cultivating that viability, though, will require that liberals in Egypt reconstitute their project in a way that does sufficient justice to Egyptian social and cultural identity, and that overcomes its elitist and authoritarian proclivities. While Shahin cautions that ignoring these imperatives will ensure that liberals will continue to fail miserably in electoral politics, he ends with the optimistic reminder that resuscitating liberalism in Egypt remains within reach.

CONCLUSION: IS LIBERALISM CONTRADICTORY?

As this is a volume dedicated to exploring illiberal currents among Egyptian liberals, we must at least briefly pause to consider whether this is a phenomenon that has valence beyond Egypt proper. Which is to say, are these contradictory tendencies better ascribed to liberalism as a philosophical and political doctrine more broadly? Indeed, a fair amount of ink has been spilled on the very issue of illiberalism within the liberal paradigm – particularly as it pertains to empire. After all, liberal ideas as they emerged in the West “did not seem particularly liberal to the peoples subjugated by British, French, and American imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries.”47 How, then, does one reconcile the fact that key liberal figures like John Stuart Mill, Alexis De Tocqueville, and others, for all their placations of individual freedoms and the liberal rule of law, were also enthusiastic supporters of the imperial projects their nations were spearheading?

Perhaps most famously, Uday Mehta’s thesis proposes that this tension is not a contradiction at all, but that imperialism in fact was a necessary byproduct of liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress – assumptions that could not help but lead to views of non-Western milieus like India – or Egypt, as the case may be – as backward and in need of imperial stewardship to properly liberalize.48 Others like Pankaj Mishra have gone further, arguing that “contradictions and elisions haunted the rhetoric of liberalism from the beginning,” and that those contradictions go beyond the contours of the imperial project. Referring to the Cold War period, Mishra notes that many of the same Western liberals who promoted a liberal market economy and equal rights as the formula for prosperity nonetheless benefited from long-established histories of economic protectionism and pervasive racism in their own nations. A deeply illiberal anti-communism, Mishra continues, eventually reincarnated itself as neo-liberalism, replete with the economic havoc it wreaked on the Global South. These contradictions are not accidental, Mishra maintains, but are necessarily outcomes of the anachronistic assumptions of the liberal project, “derived from a sanguine 19th century philosophy of history and progress” that has no space for the non-West.49

This literature indeed has implications for the liberal project in Egypt. If, in fact, liberalism is doctrinally incapable of dealing with cultural difference, then its putative failure in a non-Western context like Egypt may not be altogether surprising. But to play devil’s advocate, this body of literature has been met with some serious pushback. Works like Jennifer Pitts’s thesis argue that, while mid-nineteenth-century liberal thinkers certainly did support the conquest of non-European peoples, this posturing was actually a departure from the liberal tradition as articulated by the late eighteenth-century thinkers figures such as Mill and Tocqueville saw as their intellectual ancestors.50 Sankar Muthu goes further by articulating how an array of European political thinkers in the late eighteenth century such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and others – themselves prominent figures in the liberal canon – attacked the very foundations of the imperial project as manifestly unjust. Committed to an understanding of human beings as necessarily diverse cultural agents, Muthu maintains, these thinkers cultivated a political project that allowed non-European peoples the autonomy to order and arrange their own societal milieus.51

Suffice to say, against the backdrop of two radically competing appraisals, the scholarly literature gives us no clear answer as to where liberalism’s track record ultimately lies. But that should not deter us, because ultimately this volume is not the appropriate forum to make a definitive ontological claim about liberalism as a political philosophy in the first place – at least with finality. Insofar as this is a study of Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism, taking liberalism to task tout court would be far too ambitious for the purposes of this exercise. That said, investigating the historiography of European liberalism does allow us to conclude comfortably that the liberal project in its outcomes was beset with contradictions, irrespective of whether or not those contradictions are inherent to the ontological claims of liberal philosophy as such. Even outside the imperial context, within the European metropole these contradictions have continued to beset the revolutionary claims of the liberal project.

After all, liberalism was once a bona fide revolutionary phenomenon, having been central to the revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe, in which liberal bourgeoisie confronted counterrevolutionary efforts by aristocratic supporters of the Restoration. Thus, liberals were key to the preservation of the values embodied in the French Revolution. But when working people sought to radicalize the demands for a democratic republic with a concomitant demand to mitigate the inequities of the market, aristocratic liberals backtracked – paradoxically enough – to support the counterrevolution: “Especially with the rise of a mass-based social democratic labor movement, which sought universal suffrage and thereby threatened private property, liberals realigned themselves with the aristocratic enemies of the original revolution and helped repress the new uprisings. Their own political power was crushed, but the market was saved.” It is in this sense that, despite liberalism’s revolutionary ambitions, “[b]y the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in Europe, liberalism had become the ideology of the bourgeois gentleman.”52

Is the experience of Europe in 1848 an ominous sign of things to come in Egypt? Should the capitulation by Egyptian liberals in the aftermath of the events of July 3, 2013 be read as indicative of an abandonment by Egyptian liberalism of its revolutionary ambitions, and its domestication into the ideology of the bourgeois Egyptian gentleman? Not necessarily. Indeed, the European experience was one of a vacillation between revolution and counterrevolution, in which the immediate aftermath of mass revolts said very little about the legacies those upheavals would ultimately leave behind. While the security state under Sisi may appear to have the upper hand in Egypt as of this writing, the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 remains a work in progress. Irrespective of the ground lost to the ideals of that initial uprising since the return of military rule in 2013, dissensions in Egyptian society run as deep now as, if not deeper than, before the events of 2011 – as evidenced perhaps most recently by mass protests throughout the nation following the Sisi administration’s decision to grant territorial control of Tiran and Sanafir, strategically important islands off Egypt’s Red Sea coast, to Saudi Arabia in April of 2016.53 Remaining faithful to a longue durée approach to history, in which long-term historical structures play a more palpable role in the ebb and flow of history than individual events themselves, we can and should view the Egyptian revolution as an unfinished project that can just as easily culminate in the fulfillment of the ideals of freedom and dignity that sparked the initial protests in January of 2011 as to their abandonment.

Similarly, the story of liberalism in Egypt remains an unfinished project, one that can just as conceivably be elevated into an emancipatory political force as it could be domesticated into a desiccated relic of Egyptian elites. Which is to say, the contradictions of liberalism in Egypt are not necessarily binding, and with sufficient wherewithal from those who carry its banner the liberal project in Egypt can indeed be reconstituted to overcome its present impasse. Whether that will in fact transpire remains to be seen. But as we shall demonstrate in the pages that follow, discerning the ultimate fate of Egyptian liberalism requires taking ample stock in the specific contours of the liberal project in its Egyptian context – historically, institutionally, and culturally. And in so doing, we can credibly end by saying that the fate of the liberal experiment in Egypt will wholly depend on the extent to which Egyptian liberals are willing to articulate their political project in a way that does sufficient justice to the immanent social and cultural realities of Egyptian culture and society. If Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism is to offer only one formative lasting critique, it is that the contradictions of the liberal experiment in Egypt can only be overcome by realigning the project to speak to the needs of the Egyptian people in a cultural, social – and yes, religious – idiom that they find congruent.

It would thus be fitting to end this chapter with a bezel of wisdom from the late Pakistani-American intellectual activist Eqbal Ahmad, whose astute analyses of the politics of the Muslim world have proven increasingly timely with each year since his death in 1999.54 Indeed, in his study of Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, Nader Hashemi relies on the same sage advice as an interpretative lens to the “Muslim political drama” as it comes to fruition: “As the late Eqbal Ahmad once observed, a primary lesson to be learned from the European experience of political modernization that is relevant to a Muslim context is that ‘no significant political change occurs unless the new form is congruent with the old. It is only when a transplant is congenial to a soil that it works.’”55 Ultimately, then, if liberalism in Egypt is to overcome its contradictions, the onus is on Egyptian liberals to reconfigure their project such that it becomes congenial to Egyptian soil. We can only hope they will take that necessary initiative.

NOTES

1 Findings by Human Rights Watch, based on a year of investigation and research, conclude that key Egyptian leaders who oversaw the events at Rabaa are guilty of the “world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history” and should accordingly be tried for crimes against humanity. See Editorial Board, “Egypt should be a pariah state for its bloody crackdown on dissent,” Washington Post, August 12, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/egypt-should-be-a-pariah-state-for-its-bloody-crackdown-on-dissent/2014/08/12/04a9cfd6-223a-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html; and Human Rights Watch, All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protestors in Egypt, HRW, August 12, 2014, https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/08/12/all-according-plan/raba-massacre-and-mass-killings-protesters-egypt

2 Heba Afify, “The June 30 civilian alliance: A timeline of inception and erosion,” Mada Masr, August 14, 2014, http://www.madamasr.com/sections/politics/june-30-civilian-alliance

3 Kareem Fahim and Mayy El Sheikh, “Egyptian general calls for mass protest,” New York Times, July 24, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/world/middleeast/egypt.html

4 Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas In Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 26.

5 Heba Afify, “Ibrahim Eissa is ‘The Boss,’ but at what cost?” Mada Masr, April 28, 2014, http://www.madamasr.com/sections/politics/ibrahim-eissa-%E2%80%9C-boss%E2%80%9D-what-cost

6 Bari Weiss, “A democrat’s triumphal return to Cairo,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2011, sec. Opinion, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703408604576164482658051692

7 Joshua Hersh, “Portrait of a Cairo liberal as a military backer,” New Yorker, August 17, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/portrait-of-a-cairo-liberal-as-a-military-backer

8 Afify, “Ibrahim Eissa is ‘The Boss,’ but at what cost?”

9 Alaa al-Aswany, On the State of Egypt: What Made the Egyptian Revolution Inevitable (New York: Vintage, 2011), 96.

10 Ibid., 9.

11 Weiss, “A democrat’s triumphal return to Cairo.”

12 Negar Azimi, “The Egyptian Army’s unlikely allies,” New Yorker, January 8, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-egyptian-armys-unlikely-allies

13 Quoted in Mayy El Sheikh, “A voice of dissent in Egypt is muffled, but not silent,” New York Times, May 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/world/middleeast/an-egyptian-voice-of-dissent-is-muffled-but-not-silenced.html

14 Afify, “Ibrahim Eissa is ‘The Boss,’ but at what cost?”

15 Azimi, “The Egyptian Army’s unlikely allies.”

16 Hersh, “Portrait of a Cairo liberal as a military backer.”

17 Matt Bradley, “Military Regime Draws Support From Egypt’s Liberals,” Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2014, sec. World, http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303819704579316684260794724?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303819704579316684260794724.html

18 “Sa‘ad Al-Din Ibrahim: Either we reconcile with the Muslim Brotherhood or go to civil war,” Middle East Monitor, November 15, 2015, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20151115-sa-ad-al-din-ibrahim-either-we-reconcile-with-the-muslim-brotherhood-or-go-to-civil-war

19 Marcia Lynx Qualey, “Egypt shuts down novelist Alaa Al-Aswany’s public event and media work,” Guardian, December 11, 2015, sec. Books, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/11/egypt-shuts-down-novelist-alaa-al-aswanys-public-event-and-media-work

20 “Egypt sentences journalists to prison for ‘publishing false news’ – Committee to Protect Journalists,” accessed January 19, 2016, https://www.cpj.org/2016/01/egypt-sentences-journalists-to-prison-for-publishi.php

21 Quoted in Ahmed Aboulenein, “As hard times hit, Egyptians at last find fault with Sisi,” Reuters, March 11, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-politics-idUSKCN0WD15X

22 Karima ‘Abd al-Ghani, “Abol Ghar li ‘al-Ahram’: Qalb al masriyiin jami’an ma’ al-dawla,” Al-Ahram Online, November 13, 2015, http://www.ahram.org.eg/NewsQ/453551.aspx

23 Mohammad Abol Ghar, “Hazin ‘alaika ya watani,” Al-Masry al-Youm, March 7, 2016, http://www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/906019

24 See Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

25 Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Reviving Middle Eastern liberalism,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 4 (October 2003): 9–10.

26 Jamal Mohammed Ahmed, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 43.

27 Taha Husayn, The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954), 15, quoted in Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 42.

28 Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 43.

29 Ibid., 45.

30 Ibid., 49.

31 Ibid., 51.

32 For more on early Egyptian liberal flirtations with Pharaonism as the basis of Egyptian nationalism, see Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

33 Haykal’s turn to Islamiyyat became the subject of considerable contention in Western historiographical debates. Most notably, Nadav Safran categorized Haykal’s embrace of Islamic themes as indicative of a “crisis of orientation,” whereby Egyptian liberalism was being thrown off course from its secular foundations to instead come to embrace reactionary religious proclivities. That thesis has been thoroughly problematized in subsequent generations of scholarship – and is addressed in detail in Joel Gordon’s chapter in this volume, “Egypt’s New Liberal Crisis.” For more on the original “crisis of orientation” thesis, see Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).

34 Meir Hatina, “Arab Liberal Thought in Historical Perspective,” in Arab Liberal Thought After 1967: Old Dilemmas, New Perceptions, ed. Meir Hatina and Christoph Schumann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 28.

35 Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 336.

36 Roel Meijer, The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945–1958 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42.

37 Ibid., 61.

38 Afify, “Ibrahim Eissa is ‘The Boss,’ but at what cost?”

39 Wael Rabi‘a, “12 ‘aman ‘ala tadshin ‘haraka 9 maris majmu‘at al-‘aml min ajl istiqlal al-jami‘at,” Al-Youm al-Sab’a, March 9, 2015, http://www.youm7.com/story/2015/3/9/%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D9%88%D8%B1-12-%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8B%D8%A7-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%AA%D8%AF%D8%B4%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%A9-9-%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B3-%D9%85%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B9%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%85%D9%84-%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A3%D8%AC%D9%84-%D8%A7%D8%B3/2098697#.Voz0cZOLRE7

40 In contradistinction to the secondary education system, for which Husayn proposed considerable direct reforms and state interventions – notably the introduction of classical languages like Latin and Greek – he viewed the university as a forum that must remain wholly independent, in order to cultivate a fully autonomous intellectual community. See Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 337.

41 “Mohamed Abul-Ghar,” Jadaliyya, November 18, 2011, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3173/mohamed-abul-ghar

42 For more on the constant threats under which human rights NGOs in Egypt presently operate more broadly, please see the most recent report from Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Rights Defenders at Risk of Prosecution, HRW, March 23, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/03/23/egypt-rights-defenders-risk-prosecution

43 See most notably Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961).

44 See, for instance, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, “A voice for democracy against Egypt’s ‘Fascist Buildup,’” The Nation, February 12, 2014, http://www.thenation.com/article/voice-democracy-against-egypts-fascist-buildup/

45 Max Fisher, “What’s the Matter with Egypt’s Liberals?” Washington Post, August 12, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/08/12/whats-the-matter-with-egypts-liberals/

46 David D. Kirkpatrick, “Egyptian liberals embrace the military, brooking no dissent,” New York Times, July 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/world/middleeast/egypt-morsi.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&mtrref=undefined

47 Pankaj Mishra, “Bland fanatics,” London Review of Books, December 3, 2015, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/pankaj-mishra/bland-fanatics

48 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

49 Mishra, “Bland fanatics.”

50 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

51 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

52 Bronner, Ideas In Action, 27.

53 Jared Malsin, “The fate of two deserted islands has Egyptians taking to the streets again,” Time, April 15, 2016, http://time.com/4296334/egypt-protests-tiran-sanafir-islands/

54 For more on the life and career of Eqbal Ahmad, see the magisterial recent study of his life by one of his closest friends: Stuart Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

55 Nader Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory For Muslim Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 102.