Egyptian liberals, Islamists, and ideological statism1
AHMED ABDEL MEGUID AND DAANISH FARUQI
[when asked what would have transpired had Morsi stayed on to complete his presidency] “They would have controlled the whole country. There would be Brotherhood in the media, Brotherhood in the Ministry of Culture, Brotherhood everywhere!”
– Alaa al-Aswany2
“The loss of life is tragic...But I’m sorry to say that the Muslim Brotherhood invited this. They wanted all of the time for this to happen...I don’t accept that there are non-extremist elements to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
– Mohammad Abol Ghar3
For whatever the diversity of their political platforms, it would seem that an increasing number of Egyptian liberal figures have begun to define themselves and the worldview they represent precisely by what they oppose. Repeatedly emphasizing the existential threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood to the future of Egypt, figures like Alaa al-Aswany, Mohammad Abol Ghar, and others have established themselves as operating in binary opposition to their arch nemesis, with the former committed to liberal democratic values and the latter committed to an insidious takeover of Egyptian state and society. Thus, so the argument would go, liberalism is both the binary opposition of and the antidote to the threat of Islamism.
Yet, despite the increasing prominence of this neatly packaged binary, in fact, liberals in Egypt have more commonalities with their Islamist interlocutors than they would willingly acknowledge. In this chapter, we argue that a distinct current of liberal thought in Egypt, despite its claims to be diametrically opposed to the Islamist project, nonetheless coalesces with the Muslim Brotherhood on one fundamental basis: that both streams of thought make the same subliminal assumptions about the role of the state in the polities they seek to articulate. Embedded in both the liberal experiment in Egypt alongside the Muslim Brotherhood is a statist mentality that grants absolute power to the sovereign, an essentially Hobbesian conception of the nature and role of the state as the sole and ultimate interpreter and implementer of the Egyptian social contract.
This statist posturing, moreover, is paradoxical on both fronts, insofar as it is at odds with the putative goals articulated both by liberalism and by Islamism in their competing visions for Egyptian political life: an all-encompassing inviolable sovereign state ostensibly compromises the liberal commitment to individual liberties and rational choice, as well as the decentralized model of governance typified of the classical Islamic civilization Muslim Brotherhood figures purport to be upholding. And as we shall demonstrate, the chauvinism and intransigence of the Muslim Brotherhood under its tenure in power in post-revolutionary Egypt, and the similar intransigence of Egyptian liberals in supporting a military-led counterrevolution and the concomitant crackdown on Egyptian civil society – most perniciously the support by many liberals of the mass killings of protesters in Rabaa and al-Nahda squares – cannot be fully understood without paying sufficient attention to how deeply embedded ideological statism is in the intellectual fabric of both groups.
Accordingly, we will begin by sketching a landscape of the genealogical development of Egyptian liberalism, from its auspices in the early twentieth century, to the Nasser period onward. Granted, what we offer here is a pithy summary of the intellectual development of Egyptian liberalism, but one focusing specifically on the issue of ideological statism as part of the liberal genealogy. In so doing, we can begin to see how the forces of liberalism and Islamism ultimately converge on this one fundamental paradigm, which in turn does so much to explain the superficiality of the political visions both offer in post-revolutionary Egypt.
LIBERALS AND THE STATE: AUTHORITARIAN MODERNISM
In turning to the intellectual history of Egyptian liberalism, we see yet another paradox in this tradition’s vehement antagonism towards Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood: despite that allegedly diametrical opposition, both traditions initially commence as inheritors of the same broader intellectual genealogy of the Arab Renaissance (Nahda). Inaugurated largely as a reaction to European material ascendancy over Arab lands by the nineteenth century, the Nahda first emerged as a political project meant to challenge Eurocentric posturing towards the East, by attempting to prove the fundamental compatibility between Islam and rationality, science, and material progress. Operating in the contentious intellectual terrain of nineteenth-century social Darwinism, positivism, and scientism, Nahda figures were decidedly on the defensive, having been forced to argue against claims made by European Orientalist figures like Ernest Renan that Islam was somehow inimical to reason, and ultimately to modernity. Accordingly, the Nahda articulated a commitment to modernism, but from a position of weakness, its figures having largely accepted, prima facie, that Europe was in fact the birthplace of the modern; Nahda figures thus sought to indigenize the European success story in their own intellectual, cultural, and civilizational milieu. Under the leadership of figures like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897), Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), and later Rashid Rida (d. 1935) – all major figures of a movement often termed Islamic modernism, or Islamic liberalism – this strand of the Nahda attempted to redirect Islamic thought to its rationalist roots as a basis of modernist reform.4
On the one hand, this trend of Islamic modernism gave rise to Hassan al-Banna (d. 1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was deeply influenced by the writings of both Abduh and Rida. But on the other, Islamic modernism also gave rise to the very persuasion of Arab liberalism that is the focus of this study, perhaps best exemplified by the person of Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (d. 1963), the putative founder of Egyptian liberalism proper and himself deeply influenced by the thought of Muhammad Abduh, this strand of liberalism adopted the modernizing agenda of Abduh and his fellow religious reformers, but denuded it of religious predilections as such. Accordingly, Egyptian liberals and their Islamist adversaries in the Muslim Brotherhood – at least in the group’s founding figure of Hassan al-Banna – fall on different branches of the same intellectual genealogical tree. Needless to say, most contemporary liberals would be appalled at such an association – and perhaps justifiably so, given that Egyptian liberal thought radically diverges upon its very inception from the religious reform-oriented trend that came to inform al-Banna. But, as we shall see in more detail in the subsequent section, both nonetheless converge in sharing a reconciliatory posturing toward modernity – a posturing that comes to be fundamentally challenged in the person of Sayyid Qutb.
Yet, despite having emerged from the same intellectual pedigree as Islamic modernism, early twentieth-century Egyptian liberals of the persuasion we consider here were cut of a different cloth. Here we refer to literary figures and social critics such as Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad (d. 1964), Tawfiq al-Hakim (d. 1987), Farah Antoun (d. 1922), Salama Musa (d. 1958), Shibli Shumayal (d. 1917), Muhammad Husayn Haykal (d. 1956), and most famously Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (d. 1963), the ustadh al-jil, or teacher of the generation. In contradistinction to their Islamic modernist ancestors who, despite their clear admiration for European material progress, nonetheless committed to modernization through an immanent reform of their own religious tradition, figures in this vein instead were wholly committed to European ideals tout court. Many had spent considerable time studying in Europe, and were accordingly deeply versed in the philosophies of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Comte, the Mills, and Bentham, among others. And more interestingly for our purposes, they were also deeply versed in European writings on race and Orientalism by the likes of Ernest Renan, Gustave Le Bon, Hippolyte Taine, and Edmond Demolins. But whereas their intellectual ancestors, for example al-Afghani, went through painstaking efforts to argue against figures like Renan and their claims of the inherent irrationality of the Semitic mind, liberals of this coterie actively embraced such theories. And in so doing, they conceptualized modernist reform in Egypt as a wholly European phenomenon – which in turn necessitated wholly de-linking Egypt from its Arab-Islamic heritage.5
It is worth mentioning briefly that this particular strand of Egyptian liberalism was not all encompassing, that there remained Egyptian figures in the early twentieth century who espoused some kind of liberal reform but who nonetheless offered perfunctory concessions to the Egyptian nation’s Arab and Islamic heritage – figures such as Qasim Amin (d. 1908), Huda Sha‘rawi (d. 1947), Saad Zaghlul (d. 1927), and Tal‘at Harb (d. 1941) would qualify. But this study concerns itself more specifically with the cohort of early liberal figures that Abdeslam Maghraoui refers to as “secular modernists,” those who, following the lead of their figurehead Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, channeled their liberal reform project into a distinctly Egyptian territorial nationalism that was necessarily disassociated from Egypt’s Arab-Islamic heritage. Owing in part to their having adopted the premises of European racist scholarship decrying the inherent limitations of Semites and of Islamic civilization on the one hand, and in part to a desire to disassociate the then nascent movement of Egyptian nationalism from pan-Arab and pan-Islamic currents then extant in Ottoman lands on the other, these secular modernist liberal figures instead articulated an Egyptian nationalism that required reformulating the conception of Egyptian identity and citizenship on wholly new premises. Their antagonism towards religion was thus motivated by this desire to reconstruct Egyptian citizenship on European-inspired auspices – most notably by adopting the topos of Pharaonism as the basis of Egyptian identity, as a means of establishing a concordance between ancient Egypt and its known associations with ancient Greece, thus redefining modern Egypt as an intellectual heir of the West.6
More germane for our purposes, though, is how these figures articulated what Maghraoui calls “cultural preconditions of citizenship” into their liberal project. That is, despite the novelty of this European and secular model of citizenship these liberals espoused, their attempts to rescue an authentic Egyptian identity from the fetters of centuries of Arab and Islamic cultural imperialism did little to change the fact that the overwhelming majority of everyday Egyptians decidedly did not fit congruently with this newly envisioned European-inspired framework; a critical mass of Egyptians remained deeply beholden to Islam as a religious and cultural idiom, and to the Arabic literary and intellectual canon from which it originally was revealed. Yet as deeply elitist figures who viewed the masses as too backward and irrational to fit the proper (European and secular) mold of citizenship, secular liberals saw no need to convincingly demonstrate to the Egyptian masses why they should give up the allegedly incongruent or problematic aspects of their cultural heritage in exchange for this new enlightened conception of citizenship; they simply expected the masses to capitulate to the dictates of their liberal vision.
Indeed, many figures associated with this trend were quite explicit in their elitist paternalism, suggesting that the cultural and intellectual elite alone are capable of guiding the Egyptian nation toward its ultimate actualization.7 This paternalism goes back to Lutfi al-Sayyid, who concluded, “given the irresponsibility of the common people the rule of the country should remain in the hands of the ‘opinion makers’ (ahl al-ra’y), whom he defined as large landowners or more generally as ‘those who have a real stake in society’ (ashab al-masalih al-haqiqiyya).”8 Lutfi al-Sayyid’s patronizing attitude toward the Egyptian public came to have significant currency in the subsequent generation of thinkers he nurtured, to the extent that this defining generation of Egyptian secular liberals came to endorse a top-down model of reform: emboldened by the European-inspired liberal worldview to which they subscribed, and ultimately enforced by the hands of the state. Maghraoui explains:
There was thus no need to assess what aspects of native culture and moral values were illiberal or antidemocratic. Liberal advocates had a specific, ready-made, and expansive notion of the common good. But that is not all. They conflated the good with Western rationalism and unambiguously endorsed state intervention to pursue it. European scientific theories, the liberal reformers believed, provided a way of life different from, and better than, the dominant and irrational popular culture in Egypt.9
And herein lies the inherent statism of the Egyptian liberal project. Despite liberalism’s doctrinal emphasis on individual freedom and on the protection of those freedoms from the caprices of an excessively invasive state, early twentieth-century secular liberals proved wholly willing to ally with the state apparatus to forcibly inaugurate their vision of cultural citizenship on an otherwise unwilling populace. These were not simply armchair theorists; in their writings – largely in newspaper columns – secular liberals actively endorsed the implementation of their vision of the public good through partnership with the public authorities:
These were not just so naïve ideas totally removed from policies; liberal reformers called on the public authorities to play a dominant role. The police, schools, prisons, and hospitals were solicited again and again to enforce strict laws against unwelcome practices such as public celebration of saints, improper mourning, traditional attire, and other unhealthy habits.10
What is especially interesting is that many of the cultural practices liberals sought to extirpate through state intervention had no obvious relevance to citizenship eligibility as such. Sufi saint festivals (mawlid, plural mawalid), for instance, as celebrations of communal worship and spirituality, at face value have no bearing on the modern notion of citizenship whatsoever – particularly in light of developments in liberal theory that purport to allow for the toleration of religion, as articulated by figures like Locke and Kant. Yet liberal publications spared no effort to decry these festivals and demand that the state put a stop to them. Perhaps most intriguing of all, while their writings made no attempt to articulate why or how these celebrations compromised the political rights and responsibilities inherent in citizenship as such, liberals couched their admonitions of saint worship in the context of the European image of Egypt, and by extension the new self-image of Egypt they were trying to inculcate:
The quarter of Sayyidina al-Hussein and other sections of this district, such as Khan al-Khalili and al-Ghuriyya, are very famous among European tourists, who insist on visiting them. It is dishonorable and disreputable that European visitors see these embarrassing and repugnant sights, which confirm their ideas about Egyptians as a backward and ignorant people.11
Ultimately, then, early twentieth-century secular liberal thinkers in Egypt, as the basis of a territorial Egyptian nationalism, demonstrated a desire to cultivate a European-inspired conception of citizenship wholly denuded of Arab-Islamic baggage. But insofar as such a reform project had little purchase with the majority of Egyptians who would ostensibly constitute that political community, its architects were willing to advocate the force of the state to achieve it.
Yet, for all its promises, ultimately this elitist project of early twentieth-century Egyptian liberal nationalism proved unable to deliver on its promises to establish a politically independent and economically viable Egyptian nation-state. As Egyptians grew increasingly disillusioned with the “liberal experiment” in the 1930s, two movements emerged in response. On the one hand, this period witnessed resistance in the form of Islamism, most prominently in the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 – about which we will spill considerable ink in the next section. On the other, though, grew a movement seeking to deepen the hitherto failed liberal experiment, through the framework of “the secular discourse of radical modernism” (emphasis ours), a modernism that differed from its previous incarnation in purporting to offer a more inclusive understanding of Egyptian political community.12
Perhaps most emblematic of this new trend of liberal thought was the Society of National Renaissance (Jama‘at al-Nahda al-Qawmiyya), a liberal think tank that saw the paternalism of the previous generation of liberal thinkers as an impediment to the bona fide modernization of Egyptian political and social life. Accordingly, they rejected the romanticism of Pharaonism and other elitist forms of liberal nationalism, and maintained that the patronage and paternalism articulated by the previous generation of liberals should be replaced with modern administrative institutions “that would establish a direct link between the state and the citizen.”13 By properly incorporating the multitude of social classes into the Egyptian political system, most notably through a more robust parliament based on the constitution of 1923, the Society maintained that Egypt would in turn cultivate a vibrant civil society that would serve as a guarantee of that political system, a bulwark against the power of the state on the one hand, and against the politics of patronage and paternalism on the other – that is, a self-regulating liberal order.
But to actualize such a robust expansion of civil society, this second generation of Egyptian liberals paradoxically had to control civil society through administrative and bureaucratic means. Merrit Butrus Ghali, a leading member of the Society, articulates in his seminal text The Policy of Tomorrow (published in 1938) that on economic matters he adheres to the nineteenth-century liberal premise that the economy is the purview of civil society, and that state intervention in the economic machine is rarely if ever justified. But he nonetheless assigns a remarkable role to the state in creating the prerequisites of that civil society, in cultivating a responsible citizenship that will be able to participate fully in civic and economic life:
Areas of concern are the “major social and cultural problems, like national education and development of the national spirit, which may actually be even more important and more grave than the former [economic problems], although at times they do not call for attention and press for urgent solutions.” Indeed, government officials should “devote themselves to the development of [the] national spirit among the people, which is their task par excellence.” Once government reform programs are implemented, the ultimate goal of the liberal reform program will have been fulfilled, and “every individual would carry out his national obligation willingly without any need for check and control.”14
Thus, through modernist reform, the second generation of Egyptian liberals saw the end result of their social engineering project as a wholly self-regulating balance between government and civil society. In contradistinction to the parochialism of the first generation of liberals, the civil society envisioned by this new generation was not limited to the land-owning elite, but was open to the totality of the Egyptian nation – once it had properly imbibed the prerequisite liberal values, or the “national spirit” – that would fully integrate it into civic life. But to cultivate that national character, which would inevitably usher in a self-regulatory liberal society, Egyptian liberals of the 1930s and 40s paradoxically sought intervention from the increasingly powerful state apparatus – much in line with their predecessors in the early twentieth century, as we saw earlier.
This tendency proves especially palpable, moreover, in the context of the Egyptian peasantry. To fully integrate and civilize the country’s rural population into participating in modern civil society, liberal reformers endorsed deeply invasive measures in housing and agrarian reform – going so far as proposing bona fide surveillance measures by semi-governmental institutions to ensure that newly reconstructed rural villages adhere to sufficiently modern standards in the most intimate aspects of daily life:
“The purpose of this surveillance,” Butrus Ghali maintains, “is to “promote in them national consciousness and social responsibility.” Thus, the Institute’s job is not finished with completion of the construction of the village. Its duties include the general supervision of domestic and social life in the villages; it would also be “concerned with the village house furniture and equipment and would assist villagers in obtaining them.”15
Thus, despite the evolution of liberal thought in its move away from paternalism and toward a more unadulterated form of modernism, which once properly cemented would be inclusive of the totality of the Egyptian nation – including the peasantry – we nonetheless see consistency in liberal commitment to ideological statism.
This paradoxical reliance on state power to enforce a liberal project became even more palpable by the late 1940s, as liberals grew increasingly disillusioned with the existing political structure’s capacity to implement reforms. Unable to secure purchase for their project from the large landowners and industrialists who continued to dominate the existing parliamentary system, liberals became increasingly desperate. The election of the Wafd Party in January 1950, and its concomitant refusal to implement key liberal reforms or scale back the powers of the monarchy in favor of parliament – culminating in the 1952 burning of Cairo, the dismissal of the Wafd Party, and the return of martial law – was the last straw. Reflective of Egyptian political activism writ large during this impasse, which had by this point utterly lost faith in party politics, liberals in Egypt – as represented in this phase not only by the Society of National Renaissance, but also by leading liberal journalists of major newspapers and magazines like Ruz al-Yusuf, many of whose editors were originally trained at the Society’s monthly al-Fusul – saw no options left to pursue their project through the traditional political channels.
Accordingly, liberal figures increasingly welcomed the idea of a left-wing reformist dictatorship, or a “just tyrant” (al-musta’bid al-‘adil) to emerge and create the conditions for a liberal civil society, purge the existing political order of its corruption and patronage networks, and to then forcibly inaugurate the modernist reforms they sought. Consequently, Ihsan Abd al-Quddus, then editor-in-chief of Ruz al-Yusuf, could write in February 1952 that “Egypt is in temporary need of a dictator,” one who will act “for the people, not against them, for and not against freedom; a dictator who will push Egypt forward and not hold her back.”16 Yet liberals endorsed the rise of a reformist dictatorship with reservations, recognizing the distinct possibility that such a dictatorship could prove uncontrollable. Accordingly, they maintained, “it would have to be a temporary regime that imposed reforms from above, to eliminate the ‘grand families’ (buyutat). Afterwards, this regime would have to step back, leaving a modernized country with a truly democratic, rationalist, political system.”17
With the Free Officers Movement, it seems that liberals had their wish only partially fulfilled – their coveted dictatorship had arrived, but it proved anything but temporary. In response, in the early years of the revolution, most liberals did advocate that the military step aside and take on a civilian role by forming a political party and participating in free elections.18 But by the March Crisis of 1954, a critical mass of liberal intellectuals were ultimately domesticated by the order, under the aegis of what Roel Meijer calls “authoritarian modernism.” Which is to say, Nasser’s radical nationalist overtures aimed toward social and economic development of Egypt into an independent and modern nation-state, through meticulous technocratic state planning and industrialization, had considerable valence with Egyptian liberal intellectuals. Consequently, figures like Ihsan Abd al-Quddus, who by late 1952 was clamoring for a swift return to parliamentary politics,19 are by 1955 and 1956 increasingly enthusiastic about Nasser’s drive for industrialization, and in turn publish considerably in support of the regime’s policies.20 Democratic discourse is accordingly supplanted by calls for a “guided democracy,” in which parliamentary politics are subjected to the rules of authoritarian modernism, dictated by technocratic arguments predicated on efficiency and authoritarian organization in support of modernization. Party politics is judged under these auspices not on whether it emboldens the self-regulatory civil society that liberals originally conceived, but on whether it supports the revolution and its modernist principles.21
Yet the reorientation of these liberal figures into Nasser’s authoritarian apparatus is not entirely an about face; liberal intellectuals’ embrace of Nasser’s authoritarian modernism is wholly consistent not only with the modernist ethos that underpinned their project at its outset, but also with the commitment to ideological statism that they inherited from their intellectual predecessors of the early twentieth century. Thus, we see somewhat of a continuum in this particular strand of Egyptian liberal thought, whereby liberals in this vein, unable to garner popular support for a very elitist project of a renewed Egyptian consciousness – in the latter case through the topos of modernism – prove willing to ally with an all-powerful state to enforce it. Support by contemporary Egyptian liberals for the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated President Mohammad Morsi by the military establishment and the concomitant return to authoritarianism under Sisi – particularly given the inability of liberals to make meaningful gains in the electoral process, intimating precisely the lack of popular support that characterized earlier generations of liberal reforms – can thus be read as part of this continuum of liberal statism.
To be clear, though, the genealogy we describe here is not a linear or uninterrupted continuum, nor is it emblematic of Egyptian liberalism in its totality. As mentioned previously, this particular strand of deeply secular liberalism emerged in the early twentieth century alongside competing denominations of liberalism, those that either explicitly sought liberal reform through the prism of Islamic thought (figures like Muhammad Abduh would qualify), or at the least offered some basic courtesy to the Islamic tradition (like Qasim Amin and others). Moreover, the category of “secular modernism,” as articulated by Abdeslam Maghraoui to refer to the trend of liberalism we analyze here, does not offer us rigid and clear-cut distinctions between other trends in Egyptian liberalism. Indeed, these categories can occasionally prove porous and overlap with one another.
Two examples prove especially illuminating in this respect. First, several major figures we otherwise associate here with “secular modernism” by the 1930s came to incorporate Islamic themes (Islamiyyat) into their work – most notably Muhammad Husayn Haykal, who eventually produced a series of works on Islamic history that seemed to glorify a Muslim past. On the one hand, this turn towards Islamiyyat in the 1930s gave rise to a thesis popularized by western Orientalists as a “Crisis of Orientation,” whereby secular liberalism was being increasingly supplanted by reactionary religious impulses.22 On the other hand, that thesis was ultimately rejected by subsequent generations of scholars, who instead read Haykal and others in this vein as using religious motifs and history in order to advance liberalism to the Egyptian masses.23 While this does not wholly detract from the elitist proclivities of the secular modernist strand of liberalism discussed above, it does suggest that some figures representative of that trend did ultimately come to demonstrate some willingness to make their otherwise European-inspired political project more accessible and digestible to an Egyptian public. Second, for all their commitment to authoritarian modernism come the Nasser era, Egyptian liberals of the trend we consider here steadfastly rejected the doctrines of fascism and Nazism, and by extension the challenge such ideological forces posed to liberalism. Irrespective of their modernist blind spots, Egyptian liberals overwhelmingly opposed the allure of the equally technocratic and deeply reactionary form of modernism emblematic of the Third Reich.24
All of this is to say, we must recognize that the continuum we describe here within the secular modernist strand of Egyptian liberalism is not a perfect one; exceptions have presented, and will continue to present, themselves, be it with respect to the tradition’s commitment to secularism, or to authoritarian modernism. But even taking into account the exceptions of this clearly imperfect continuum, we nonetheless clearly see a statist ethos permeating this denomination of Egyptian liberalism. And in this sense, as we shall see in the next section, liberals have far more in common with their erstwhile Islamist enemies than they are willing to admit.
ISLAMISTS AND THE STATE: THE MODERNIST PARADOX
Islamists have tended to have an ambivalent attitude toward the idea of the modern state as the form proper of the body politic, and Islamist ideologues in Egypt are no exception. In this section, we will explicate further this complicated relationship between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the modern state, through the work of two of its most prominent figures: its founder Hassan al-Banna, on the one hand, and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), perhaps the most controversial theorist the movement has produced to date, on the other. By juxtaposing these two thinkers, in the first part of this section we will highlight a subtle yet critically important shift in the Brotherhood’s attitude toward the concept of the state. Namely, the movement’s relationship with the state is inextricably tied to its ambivalent intellectual and moral attitude toward Western modernity – an attitude that vacillates from willful embrace to a paradoxically incomplete repudiation. This problematic tension of the Brotherhood’s relationship with modernity, moreover, in turn, gives rise to an equally problematic tension in its conception of and engagement with the state as constitutive of the Egyptian body politic. And it is only through this tension that we can make full sense of the Brotherhood’s political comportment in the January 2011 revolution and the events that followed, as we articulate in the second section.
Islam and the question of modernity between Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb
Reading Hassan al-Banna’s treatises one cannot miss their distinctly modernist tone. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and Rashid Rida, al-Banna puts forward a vision for a social order and ideal governance that is rooted in the firm conviction that Islam is wholly compatible with the use of reason and science.25 However, unlike Abduh and al-Afghani, al-Banna is not concerned with developing a new Islamic epistemology per se, whether by resorting to classical Islamic philosophy as in the case of the former or, as in the case of the latter, by calling for a quasi-Averroist engagement with the revelation privileging a rationally apodictic interpretation of religious rulings over purely literal ones.26 Rather, al-Banna was specifically interested in fulfilling the dream originally articulated by his mentor Rashid Rida, of cultivating an Islamic legal and political theory that would be consistent with the demands of popular sovereignty characteristic of constitutionalism and the modern nation-state.27 And most germane for our purposes, in the wake of this attempt, al-Banna assigns a considerable role to the state in securing the discursive and non-discursive conditions that would allow for a modern Islamic society to come to fruition.
In his treatise Toward the Light, after having emphasized the need for Islam as a guiding societal framework, given the moral incoherence of Western ideologies and philosophies, al-Banna moves on to offer specific policy recommendations to the then Egyptian monarch King Faruq. In the spirit of the tradition of advice-to-kings literature (nasa’ih al-muluk) prominent in medieval Islamic thought, al-Banna devotes a considerable section to practical steps for reform, giving the following admonitions on political, judicial, and administrative matters:
...An end to the party rivalry, and a channeling of the political forces of the nation into a common front and single phalanx...The diffusion of the Islamic spirit throughout all departments of the government, so that all its employees will feel responsible for adhering to Islamic teachings...The surveillance of the personal conduct of all its employees and an end to the dichotomy between the private and professional sphere...28
Similarly, on social and educational matters, as al-Banna categorizes them, he gives another set of prescriptions to the Egyptian monarch:
...Conditioning the people to respect public morality and the issuance of directives fortified by the aegis of the law on this subject; the imposition of severe penalties for moral offenses...The surveillance of theaters and cinemas and rigorous selections of plays and films...The expurgation of songs and a rigorous selection and censorship of them...The regulation of business hours for cafes; surveillance of the activities of their regular clients; instructing these as to what is in their best interest; withdrawal of permission from cafes to keep such long hours...Properly selecting whatever is being presented to the public whether songs, public lectures or general issues and using radio and television broadcasting in edifying the citizens patriotically and ethically...resisting bad habits whether economic or ethical and steering the public away from them like the habits associated with weddings, funerals, celebrations of the birth of religious figures, celebrating feasts, religious ritualistic ceremonies. The government should lead by example in properly straightening these bad habits...Consideration of ways to arrive gradually at a uniform mode of dress for the nation...29
There is an obvious Jacobin rationale governing al-Banna’s thinking. He assigns the sovereign power the right to monitor almost every aspect of the private life of the individual. From his perspective, securing this role will guarantee that society will ultimately develop to the extent that it will be prepared to fully accept the return of Islam as the ultimate legal and moral referent governing Egyptian society. Thus, in al-Banna’s vision the state plays a fundamental role in forging the moral sentiments, social objectives, and political vision of a proper Islamic society. This Hobbesian conception of an all-encompassing Leviathan state, moreover, is in full accord not only with the colonial administration governing Egypt at the time, but also with the strands of Egyptian liberalism analyzed previously. Regarding the former, the British administration maintained a totalitarian form of rule over its colonial holding that granted it full bio-political governmentality, in Foucauldian terms.30 And regarding the latter, as the previous section demonstrated, secular modernist currents in Egyptian liberal discourse gave rise to this same Leviathan by granting the state full sovereignty to forcibly eradicate allegedly problematic or offensive social and cultural practices in the name of cultivating the preconditions for proper liberal citizenship – despite those practices bearing no immediate relevance to citizenship as such, and despite this all-encompassing statist posturing being a fundamental contradiction of the basic assumptions of liberal theory about individuality and the protection of private life.
And just as this Hobbesian Leviathan proves contradictory from the liberal framework, it also radically contrasts with the classical view of Islamic governance in medieval and early modern Muslim societies. In this milieu, governmentality was primarily the purview of scholars – be it jurists, Sufi masters, or theologians – operating independently of the state.31 Such independence from the fetters of the state apparatus, economically secured through the Islamic system of endowments (awqaf), afforded the cultivation and protection of a robust pluralism in Muslim legal and theological schools. This intellectual pluralism, argued medieval Muslim polymaths Averroes (d. 1198)32 and al-Juwayni (d. 1085)33 before him, accommodated the several different and often competing orientations of the members of the body politic and should thus be solemnly protected by the sovereign. Departing from this paradigm, al-Banna wanted the modernist state to be the tool for restoring the Islamic body politic, and the embodiment of the project of Islamic modernism envisioned by his intellectual ancestors Abduh and Afghani. And in so doing, al-Banna eschews the classical legacy of intellectual pluralism by offering the sovereign hitherto unimaginable authority over the public and private lives of subjects of his modernist Islamic state – which would necessarily render pluralism in the classical sense an impossibility. To put it more explicitly, the attempt of Hassan al-Banna to undertake a modernist reformation of Islam from a political perspective led him to embrace the modernist advocacy of the absolute power of the sovereign at the heart of the modern theory of the state, from Hobbes and Spinoza down to Hegel. In other words, al-Banna’s interest in a modernist reconstruing of the role of the sovereign in order to construct an Islamic state was a reason for him to compromise the pluralism at the heart of the classical Muslim body politic. Al-Banna’s line of thinking in this respect, moreover, comes to fruition when it is taken up by his successors, namely Sayyid Qutb. And Qutb’s subtle reorientation of the question of the state becomes pivotal to the future reorientation of the Muslim Brotherhood project. It is to his work that we shall now turn.
In engaging Qutb’s writings directly, we will also be reading Qutb in close conversation with Roxanne Euben, whose work has done much to inform scholarly reception on Qutb’s thought and intellectual genealogy. This intellectual genealogy is crucial, moreover, in making sense of Qutb’s understanding of the state. In Enemy in the Mirror, Euben argues that Qutb maintained a certain ambivalence towards the state.34 Qutb took what Euben considered an anti-hermeneutical position, one in which he outright “[denies] that his own interpretation of Islam is an act of interpretation.”35 Instead, Islam for Qutb is a religious doctrine that is necessarily oriented to praxis, and thus may not be reduced to armchair theorizing; intellectualizing Islam in this respect then would be to engage in “a kind of scholastic sophistry” that would necessarily “rend the essential connection between Islam and action.”36
Accordingly, Qutb rejects any speculation on the theoretical level about the nature of the Islamic state, its relation to the body politic, or how it will reflect a vision of the relation between the private and the public spheres. Similarly, he rejects any practical speculation about the institutions or methods of governance to be adopted by this state. Instead, Qutb contends that the general maxims of Shari‘ah, such as the maintenance of social justice and fair distribution of wealth, suffice as guidelines for governance in any historical context. Islam should thus be understood as “an unchanging worldview that allows for variation in application depending on circumstances and needs,” variation which precludes a specific blueprint of an Islamic state; “[t]here are no specifics to address, Qutb insists, because Islam is not theory, but practice.”37 That unchanging worldview, moreover, provides a trans-historical moral unity for human endeavors that the rationally based modern sciences cannot furnish. Thus Euben writes:
...all human knowledge...is by definition incomplete and fragmentary, a distortion of nature. Indeed, Qutb implicitly suggests that without the possibility of unitary knowledge – and in particular acknowledgment of a moral unity in terms of which we can organize human life – humanity is cut adrift, doomed to a knowledge that is purely positivistic and instrumental.38
Yet paradoxically, Qutb seems to be simultaneously maintaining a position similar to that of the early modernist Islamists and that of al-Banna, in arguing that establishing an Islamic state is the realization of the most important tenet of Islam, namely the sovereignty (hakimiyya) of God.39 In this respect, Qutb writes:
...the divine character [of the Islamic system of governance] is achieved in Islam through monotheism manifested in attributed sovereignty to God. This is an essential part of Islamic monotheism. The Islamic system is singled out by this divine nature among other systems known by mankind, including the theocratic model. In the latter the ruler derives his authority from either clergy or from his divine right, as much as he is the vicegerent of God on earth. But the divine nature of Islamic governance has to do with the nature of the system itself, not the ruler or his authority. The ruler in Islam does not derive his authority from the clergy or claim it by divine right. Rather he derives it from the free oath of allegiance pledged to him by his people. Similarly, he lays claim to the obedience of the people inasmuch as he applies God’s Shari‘ah.40
The realization of God’s sovereignty, Qutb argues, is indeed the most important aim of any Muslim, let alone the hope of humanity for salvation from the moral decadence of modernity.41 That said, even as Qutb leaves the contours of the Islamic system of governance upon which divine sovereignty would rest nebulously defined, several themes interspersed throughout his works allow us to speculate on the features of Qutb’s Islamic state. For all his disdain for modern rationalism, his state would be committed to modern technology and scientific advancement, as well as to social justice and the eradication of poverty. Accordingly, Qutb’s Islamic state is ultimately a modern state: “These speculative conclusions indicate that Qutb’s Islamic state would not represent an attempt to recreate the structure and organization of seventh-century Mecca. On the contrary, they point to an embrace of many of the social and economic processes commonly associated with ‘modernization’ as defined by social science.”42 Thus, Qutb’s thought reflects an ambivalent attitude toward modernity, which simultaneously offers a seeming endorsement of al-Banna’s statist thesis, alongside a wholly contradictory aversion to modern rationalism.
In light of this ambivalence, Euben arrives at the conclusion that Qutb’s anti-rational and anti-hermeneutical position gives rise to his constructing an alternative modernity rather than rejecting modernity altogether.
It is perhaps more illuminating to characterize Qutb’s work as an embrace of the non-rational, that is, an argument for the authority of knowledge that is by definition beyond human reason...Understood in this way, in Qutb’s work we are witnessing not anti-modernism but rather another perspective on and attempt to redefine what it must mean to live in the modern world, a perspective that challenges the so called imperatives of modern rationalism in the name of other possible modernities.43
While Euben’s point is convincing, we would like to highlight another possible interpretation of Qutb’s ambivalent attitude toward the state and its modern genealogy. That is to say, as Euben astutely articulates, Qutb’s hesitance toward the role of the state indicates a certain disenchantment with modernity. Euben diagnoses this disenchantment as a parting of ways with al-Banna and other modernist Islamists. What we would like to argue instead is that Qutb’s position is a reflection of the broader failure of the metaphysical foundations undergirding the modern nation-state, a malaise that permeated the 1950s and 60s with the general aura of disenchantment with modernity and modern forms of metaphysics in the aftermath of World War II. There are many examples of this genre of thought but chief among them include Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Qutb’s work, having been produced under the yoke of Nasser’s deeply authoritarian yet “modernist” police state, reflected that same disillusionment. If Qutb’s ideas are read in the context of this era of disenchantment with modernity, we can shed new light on his call for a discourse that replaces the reconciliatory attempts of early modernist Islamists who, under the spells both of colonialism and of nineteenth-century scientism ardently sought to demonstrate the roots of rationalism as most palpably manifested in Islamic thought.
This discourse, moreover, would also be a rejoinder to Egyptian liberals who, despite their antagonistic relationship to religion and to Islamists, were responding to the same environment of scientism and social Darwinism – as evidenced by their embrace of Ernest Renan and other European Orientalists, as we saw in the previous section – and were thus part of the same reconciliatory project. Their reconciliatory approach differed only insofar as they excised Islam as the operational discourse from which to inaugurate a rational order, but were ultimately aspiring for the same reconciliation with modernity in Egypt. Thus, in his project Qutb rejects the posturing of both his Islamist genealogical ancestors and the secular liberals.
In contradistinction to his genealogical ancestors like al-Banna, Qutb reflected a more mature realization of the failures and limitations of the modernist project. His antagonism towards Nasser’s nationalism was an antagonism toward a self-defeated attempt by a Muslim state to revive an already thoroughly problematized modernist project that was (in his eyes) radically opposed to Islam, and by extension to Islam’s inherent capacity to overcome the impasses produced by modernity. Though to be clear, that does not mean that Qutb’s critique was simply an Islamized form of the postmodernist critique of rationalism. After all, postmodernism was a distinctly Western reaction to the failure of Western modernity. Qutb, by contrast, was interested in a rational displacement of the modernist project, which for him was inherently tied to colonialism and thus was inimical to liberty and individual freedom. This is rather evident in his critique of both liberal rationalism, and of Marxism and the historical materialism undergirding it, both of which he saw as obverses of the same phenomenon.44 Qutb’s modernist discourse is an expression of a strategic realism that echoes the realism and to some extent the pragmatism of al-Banna.45 It is a method that accepts reality as it is, and then responds by radically transforming it.
However, the intellectual stagnation that plagued the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements since the late 1960s precluded any attempt at using Qutb’s critique of modernity as a basis for a fully fledged Islamic political theory. Moreover, Qutb’s own rather limited knowledge of the history and development of modernity on its philosophical and historical levels, to say nothing of his ultimately superficial understanding of the classical Islamic sciences, made his project especially inaccessible for future generations. What survived of Qutb was the radical tone that pervaded his rejection of Nasser’s nationalistic modernism. Such radicalism ultimately left the Muslim Brotherhood with an ambivalent re-espousal of al-Banna’s statist project, alongside the deep aversion toward modernity that they inherited from Qutb. While this aversion did not manifest itself violently in the discourse and practice of the Muslim Brotherhood itself, it definitely did so in the Jihadist movements that dogmatically adopted his thought. Furthermore, this ambivalent intellectual inheritance ultimately manifested itself clearly in the Brotherhood’s handling (and mishandling) of the January 25 revolution and the events that followed, most notably in its brief period of stewardship of the presidency under Mohammad Morsi. It is to this period that we shall now turn.
Egypt’s revolution and the paradoxical heritage of al-Banna and Qutb
Following an era of brutal persecution under Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood shifted gears to engage in strategic politics during the reigns of Sadat and Mubarak. In her important study The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement, Carrie Wickham characterizes this era of political pragmatism, which spanned around forty years between 1970 and 2011, primarily in terms of a series of tensions. The most salient of these tensions is that between self-assertion and self-restraint.46 Wickham writes:
The arc of the Brotherhood’s strategy during this period can be likened to the swing of a pendulum, seesawing between moments of self-assertion and moments of self-restraint. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s trajectory did not trace a linear path toward greater integration into the political system. Instead it took the form of a sequence of fits and starts, its leaders continually recalibrating the terms of their engagement in an effort to expand their influence without jeopardizing the group’s survival. More specifically, the Brotherhood’s trajectory in the decade before the uprising arguably encompassed three distinct phases: (1) an initial period of guardedness in which the group attempted to recover from the repressive measures taken against it in the mid-to late 1990s (2000–2003); (2) a period of bolder self-assertion against the backdrop of a short-lived political opening (2004–5); and (3) a reversion to self-restraint following the onset of a new wave of repression (2005–10). Yet we can also discern a wider pattern in which a combination of external pressure and internal group dynamics worked to limit the pace and scope of “auto-reform.”47
On the one hand, the Brotherhood sought to assure both the regime and secular forces within Egyptian society that it does not seek a monopoly of power. But on the other, it was keen to assert the power it had legitimately commanded as the most organized political movement in Egypt. We would like to contextualize this tension in light of the troubled heritages of al-Banna and Qutb articulated earlier.
In the wake of the January 25, 2011 revolution, this tension between self-assertion and self-restraint palpably characterized Brotherhood decisions and general policy. While Brotherhood youth and especially young women actively participated in the revolution from its outset, its leadership publicly announced taking part in the uprising only after being fully convinced that abstention is no longer viable from a pragmatic standpoint. In the two years that followed the ouster of deposed President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, this pragmatic attitude continued to be the hallmark of the Brotherhood politics, owing in large part to mounting pressure as it endeavored to establish an equilibrium between political ascendancy and (at the very least portending) political pluralism. On the one hand, as the biggest political organization in the country, the Brotherhood was forced to carefully manage the conflict with the deep state that had been governing Egypt for more than half a century, represented during this period by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). On the other hand, the Brotherhood needed to secure buy-in from other political players, reiterate their respect for pluralism, and eschew any pretensions to seeking to monopolize political power. 48
This vacillation between self-assertion and self-restraint persisted, moreover, even after Morsi’s ascent to power in June 2012. Despite having exercised firm political resolve to issue important rulings during his tenure – like his decision to order the retirement of both SCAF chairman Mohammad Hussein Tantawi and deputy chairman Sami Anan – Morsi was nonetheless continuously forced to capitulate to increasing pressures from the Egyptian deep state, and from secular political parties in the country. A key example of Morsi’s capitulation in this respect was his eventual decision to backtrack on his own July 8, 2012 edict reinstating the hitherto dissolved (majority Islamist) parliament, in response to threats by the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) and SCAF.
Indeed, this impasse was emblematic of a greater refusal by the Egyptian deep state to fully transfer executive authority to the newly elected president, most notably through an abrupt constitutional supplement announced by SCAF on June 17 – the second day of the presidential runoff – that, anticipating a Morsi victory, stripped the president of his authorities over matters of national defense and security, keeping those privileges under the purview of SCAF until the drafting of a new constitution. These sanctions on Morsi were backed, moreover, by mounting objections from secular political forces, who represent the core of the Egyptian economic and social elite.49 Faced with pressures from at least three different political forces even before he formally assumed the presidency, Morsi was under considerable pressure to appeal to a broader constituency in Egyptian society, while at the same time being careful not to appear insufficiently committed to its Islamist base. Or, put another way, “[t]o win over its opponents without losing its supporters, the Brotherhood will need to walk a fine line, affirming its fidelity to the Islamic cause while honoring the democratic and inclusive spirit of the uprising that brought it to power.”50
But did it succeed in doing so? Wickham ends her analysis by emphasizing the Brotherhood’s ambivalence, if not outright failure, to properly respond to pressures for democratization. According to Wickham, despite making statements portending political and social inclusivity, the Brotherhood did not clearly and transparently articulate its stance toward the application of Shari‘ah as it pertains to religious minorities.51 Similarly, for whatever attempts Morsi made to assure women he had no intention of denying their rights, feminist activists grew increasingly concerned about women’s rights and political representation under his tenure, particularly in light of a series of public statements by Morsi suggesting that men and women already have legal equality in Egypt, and that no additional reforms are necessary because laws protecting women’s welfare are already in place.52
To further problematize the Brotherhood’s internal contradictions, Wickham moves on to put the Brotherhood in conversation with more successful global Islamist currents. More specifically, she compares the failure of the Brotherhood to the relative gains made by other Islamist movements in Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait, emphasizing that these groups succeeded in large part by successfully reconciling their Islamic values and conceptual orientation with the specific contours of the modernist state project in which they were operating.53 The Brotherhood, by contrast, was not nearly as successful in reconciling that tension with the modern state. Thus, the Brotherhood’s vacillation between self-assertion and self-restraint, as explicated by Wickham, can be better understood as symptomatic of its ambivalent relationship toward modernity in general, and to the state as a modern concept in particular – an ambivalence rooted in the tension produced by the overlapping projects of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.
Moreover, in addition to the practical tension Wickham articulates, Ashraf El-Sherif offers an additional major problematic that led to the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – one that, we submit, is similarly a product of the movement’s deeper epistemological ambivalence toward modernity.54 Writing for the Carnegie Endowment as part of a series on political Islam in Egypt, El-Sherif attempts to diagnose what led to the Brotherhood’s untimely demise only a year after it assumed the presidency. More specifically, El-Sherif argues that the Brotherhood’s failure, even in the context of a hostile political environment, was primarily due to its own centralized authoritarian power structure, and its lack of any substantive democratic culture at an organizational level. El-Sherif ascribes this deficit in large part to what he characterizes as ideological hollowness, whereby the Brotherhood’s emphasis on cultivating an enormous popular following – most notably through its famous charity networks – came at the expense of properly cultivating a clearly articulated ideological architecture for its broader “Islamic project.” The nebulously defined ideology was helpful in allowing the Brotherhood to mobilize across wide segments of the Egyptian population that could have otherwise been alienated by excessively dogmatic positions, but it also prevented it from formulating meaningful ideologically grounded answers to the most fundamental questions plaguing Egyptian politics, like the relationship between Islam and democracy, pluralism, and civil society. These ideological deficiencies, El-Sherif continues, are emblematic of the Brotherhood’s contradictory understanding of its own Islamic project:
At the root of these deficiencies was the puritanical dream of an “Islamic state” that would resuscitate the Islamic caliphate and lead members of the Brotherhood toward the realization of their Islamic identity, salvation, and empowerment. In reality, however, the Brotherhood’s concept of an Islamic state owes more to modernist ideas of a strong, authoritarian developmental state than to classical Islamic political thought. The concept of the Islamic state as the organizational embodiment of the Islamic order in the Brotherhood’s doctrine is actually quite different from the concept of government in Islamic law. Historically, Islamic government was checked by other nonstate actors and enjoyed much less disciplinary and regulatory power over the population than the modern state does.
The Brotherhood understood the concept of Islamic identity in two parallel but contradictory ways: first, as an immobile set of religious attributes and cultural characteristics that the Islamic state needed to guard; and second, as a living set of political, social, economic, and cultural paradigms yet to be realized by the Islamic state. The two understandings were incongruous, but both implied that the Islamic state was the true representative of Islamic identity and therefore had a vital role to play in the defense and designation of that identity.55
According to El-Sherif there is an inherent paradox in how the Muslim Brotherhood conceptualizes its own project; beholden to the idea of an Islamic state, itself informed in large part by a romantic desire to restore Islam as the basis of political life, yet at the same time equally beholden to wholly modernist ideas that underpin this state. The Muslim Brotherhood’s failure on the one hand to clearly articulate an interest in democratization, as manifested in its vacillation between self-assertion and self-restraint, and its similar failure on the other to adjust its politics and rhetoric to accommodate the new realities of post-revolutionary Egypt is inextricably connected to the paradox El-Sherif articulates.
Ultimately, though, this intellectual paradox, like the practical tension between self-restraint and self-assertion, is rooted in a deeper one: it is grounded in the historical tension between al-Banna’s project of harmonizing Islam with modernity on the one hand, and the radical critique of modernity by Qutb on the other. The Muslim Brotherhood has proven guilty of many breathtaking failures during its history – particularly since 2011 – but perhaps its worst failure of all has been its inability to capitalize fully on either al-Banna’s project or Qutb’s project with any serious intellectual rigor. On the one hand, no real attempt was made to develop Qutb’s radical critique of modernity into an alternative project that can slowly construct from within the modern condition a path to reverse it – on both discursive and non-discursive levels. On the other hand, the Brotherhood made no attempt to reconcile the Islamic legal and political corpus with modernity per al-Banna’s vision.
And accordingly, the Brotherhood’s failure to develop fully either of these nascent intellectual projects pushed it in the direction of an authoritarian form of modernism. As Carrie Wickham has argued, the partial success of other Islamist movements was proportionate with their success in developing a discourse and system of policies that utilizes Islamic values and concepts specifically within the framework afforded by modernist structural and discursive conditions. This is evident in the case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, as El-Sherif notes, and on a smaller scale in the case of Morocco and Kuwait, as Wickham notes.56 Seeking to replicate the same successes won by these other Islamist groups, then, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was driven toward a modernist path and hence toward a position that capitalizes on al-Banna and Rashid Rida’s legacy of reconciling Islam and modernism. However, the lack of a fully fledged intellectual vision for such reconciliation, which, on the political level, meant lacking a vision of a modern Islamic state that builds on the particular immanent structural conditions and values of Egyptian society, led them to an authoritarian interpretation of this state. For only through authoritarianism can Muslims safeguard themselves against contamination by the harmful modern values so thoroughly chastised in Qutb’s thesis.
In turn, this interpretation is indeed what the Muslim Brotherhood shares with the secular modernist vision upheld by many Egyptian liberals. Both camps lack any real intellectual vision about the concept and role of the state and how such a modern idea could respond to the norms they themselves claim to defend in the specific cultural and social context of Egypt. In the case of the Brotherhood, the intellectual poverty of their movement and its inability to critically wrestle with the theoretical projects inaugurated by al-Banna or Qutb led to an impasse that cannot help but support an authoritarian state. And in the case of the liberals, their similarly dogmatic commitment to ideological statism ultimately paved the way for its embrace of authoritarian modernism under Nasser, and most recently under Sisi.
CONCLUSION: POST-ISLAMISM AND POST-LIBERALISM AS POST-STATISM
In 1996, Asef Bayat published his quite influential essay, “The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society.”57 Building on Olivier Roy’s thesis in The Failure of Political Islam,58 and grounding his assertions on transformations then transpiring in Iran, Bayat argued that the failure of many Islamist movements as such does not necessarily indicate their demise. Rather, it indicates a radical transformation of their intellectual basis, ideological orientation, and social praxis. Subsequently, in 2013, Bayat argued that post-Islamism is a twofold term that refers to a condition and a project into which Islamism59 has historically evolved.60 The condition is one “...where following a phase of experimentation, the appeal, energy, and sources of legitimacy of Islamism are exhausted even among its once-ardent supporters. Islamists become aware of their discourse’s anomalies and inadequacies as they attempt to institutionalize or imagine their rule.”61 The project of Post-Islamism, by contrast, refers to Islamists’ “...conscious attempt to conceptualize and strategize the rationale and modalities of transcending Islamism in social, political, and intellectual domains.”62 However, this transformation that members of Islamist movements are undergoing or may undergo is “...neither anti-Islamic nor un-Islamic or secular.”63 Giving examples from the experience of the AKP in Turkey and how, for instance, it had to adapt economic policies that it originally saw as non-Islamic in order to adapt to the realities of modern politics, Bayat concludes that Post-Islamism is a category emblematic of the fundamentally changing conditions and nature of Islamist discourse, which to him seem rather inevitable.64
Building on Bayat’s thesis, we would like to argue that the transformation that is likely to happen to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the near future, at least on the discursive level, is a turn toward post-statism. The tension we articulated earlier between the often-overlooked project of Qutb to displace modernity on the one hand and the project of al-Banna to mold an Islamic framework within the scheme of the modern state on the other is bound to resurface, both for Islamist actors in general and for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Egyptian Islamists in particular. For this tension to be reconciled, though, Islamists will ultimately need to reassess the question of sovereignty in the political project they are attempting to establish. Presently, owing to the intellectual impasse in which the Brotherhood finds itself between al-Banna’s reconciliatory (yet deeply statist) Islamic modernism and Qutb’s radical critique of modernity, its project ultimately grounds sovereignty in absolutist, statist terms. Overcoming this impasse calls for a serious subsiding of this modernist tension through a critical reengagement with the largely decentralized milieu of medieval and early modern Islamic governance – and by extension with the intellectual pluralism it helped preserve, as described earlier. Modern Islamists would need to examine this legacy and discern how, if at all possible, it may offer a vision for a way out of the crisis of sovereignty produced by the modernist – and, as Wael Hallaq recently argued, distinctly European – structure of the state upon which they presently ground their political project.65
The intellectual conditions for doing so, moreover, will prove more apposite moving forward. The reason being, this tension will now reemerge in a wholly different context, in which the secular assumptions of the modern liberal state are being subjected to a radical critique in political theory and philosophy on the one hand,66 and in social theory and anthropology on the other.67 Moreover, the inevitable resurfacing of this tension will transpire in the context of an entirely new discourse on the advent of the post-secular, in which the return of religion and the metaphysical seem to be inevitable.68 The implications of this new intellectual context and environment suggest that both the proponents of al-Banna’s position and those of Qutb’s project will comfortably share the common ground of a radical critique of Western modernity. In such a categorically different intellectual landscape, building an Islamic discourse on politics and governance will take on an entirely new form – one that must, if the project expects to have any long-term staying power, articulate political sovereignty in a way that departs from the absolutist statist auspices presently undergirding it.
Furthermore, there is an even more serious predicament facing liberals in Egypt, though it requires a more radical confrontation with the premises of their own discourse. Unlike early twentieth-century Egyptian liberals, who could complacently take the rational assumptions of liberalism as a political philosophy for granted, contemporary Egyptian liberals must adequately respond to the problems posed in recent decades to the very assumptions undergirding liberalism in the postmodern age. In this respect, liberalism as a worldview faces two fundamental challenges on the theoretical and practical levels. The key assumption grounding liberal theory more broadly – whether in the classical Kantian or more contemporary Rawlsian and/or Habermasian models – concerns the rationality of the liberal subject and society on the one hand, and, more importantly, the rationality of political judgment on the other. Granted, this spectrum of rationality varies dramatically, from an idealist, deontological form as in the Kantian assumption of the “Kingdom of Ends,” to a more diluted form in the Rawlsian assumption of a minimal level of reasonableness as a precondition for a well-ordered society.69 In the Kantian model, autonomous members of rational, liberal societies will supposedly deal with each other as ends in themselves, according to the universal nature of the rationally based ethical maxims that Kant termed the categorical imperative.70 The classical rational assumption of Kant’s project – extending even to neo-Kantian formulations – was subsequently critiqued as utterly idealistic and completely impractical, which in turn called for a reconsideration of liberal theory.71 In this vein, Rawls put forward his humbler choice of reasonableness as the basis for a contractual liberal society.
But Rawls’ liberal theory is plagued with a series of blind spots. Namely, the assumption of a reasonable liberal subject presents problems in dealing with members of liberal societies who believe in metaphysical or comprehensive doctrines, to use Rawls’ own language, and who thus cannot fully fit within the fetters of public reasonable discourse as Rawls defined – not to say that religion is inherently irrational or unreasonable. Religion has been a consistent thorn in the side of liberal theory in this respect, and the challenge it has posed to the liberal worldview has been exacerbated most recently by the rise of religious fundamentalism and the salient return of religion to politics in North America and Europe – especially in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Jürgen Habermas, a scion in contemporary liberal thought, faces precisely this dilemma in his attempt to ground liberalism in a “universal pragmatics” as the basis of communication in rational societies. Indeed, Habermas has more recently recognized the limitations of his project to address or accommodate religion, and has thus begun to articulate dialogical conditions for the inclusion of religion, or its naturalization, in post-metaphysical and supposedly “rational” societies.72 Habermas’s latest intervention is by no means the final word in reconciling liberal rationalism’s impasse on the question of religious metaphysics, but his recent turn to the subject of religion underscores that liberalism’s rationalist assumptions can no longer be taken wholly for granted.
Moreover, liberal rationalism produces a second major contradiction, in the context of liberalism’s incestuous relationship with corporate capitalism. In contradistinction to the classical assumptions of theorists of capitalism like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the greedy pursuit of individual interests has proven largely resistant to rationalization as such. And in this sense, despite being a post-structuralist and thus unaligned with rationality as such, Alain Badiou depicts this internal contradiction rather accurately. In his essay “The Democratic Emblem,” Badiou reconstructs the Platonic rational argument against the democratic soul in Books IX and X of the Republic, specifically in the context of the failure of liberal capitalism in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis – of which Badiou anticipates an inevitable recurrence. Here he articulates how the capitalistic nature of modern liberal societies ultimately gives rise to a fundamental contradiction with their own liberal assumptions. Capitalism makes the individual basis of choice not reason but the pursuit of immediate pleasure and selfish interest, that resists any rational telos that someone like Adam Smith tried to assume. About this nature of the liberal-democratic ethos, Badiou writes:
Democratic man lives only for the pure present, transient desire is his only law. Today he regales himself with a four-course dinner and vintage wine, tomorrow he is all about Buddha, ascetic fasting, streams of crystal-clear water, and sustainable development. Monday he tries to get back in shape by pedaling for hours on a stationary bicycle: Tuesday he sleeps all day, then smokes and gorges again in the evening. Wednesday he declares that he is going to read some philosophy, but prefers doing nothing in the end. At Thursday’s dinner party he crackles with zeal for politics, fumes indignantly at the next person’s opinion, and heatedly denounces the society of consumption and spectacle. That evening he goes to see a Ridley Scott blockbuster about medieval warriors. Back home, he falls to sleep and dreams of liberating oppressed peoples by force of arms. Next morning he goes to work, feeling distinctly seedy, and tries without success to seduce the secretary from the office next door. He’s been turning things over and has made up his mind to get into real estate and go for the big money. But now the weekend has arrived, and this economic crisis isn’t going away, so next week will be soon enough for all that. There you have a life, or lifestyle, or lifeworld, or whatever you want to call it: no order, no ideas, but nothing too disagreeable or distressing either. It is as free as it is unsignifying, and insignificance isn’t too high a price to pay for freedom.73
Badiou insists that this contradictory nature, which he characterizes as false ‘subjective mastery,’ should provoke all liberal-democrats to revert to what he portrays – albeit from his distinctly post-structuralist Marxist perspective – as the original meaning of democracy. Badiou describes this meaning in terms of a full embracing of the immanent material force in the people, which does not assume any metaphysical ground. This in turn necessitates that politics, in a true sense of subjective mastery – which he defines as the mastery of thought and praxis – will come to “have independent value, obeying its own atemporal norms like science and art. Politics will not be subordinated to power, to the State.”74 Only by embracing an independent politics, unencumbered by the fetters of the state as such, can liberal-democrats resolve the contradictions of liberal rationalism produced by its flirtations with global capitalism, and thus make possible the restoration of “...the power of peoples over their own existence...From that perspective, we will only ever be true democrats...”75
Thus, the assumptions of liberal rationalism have left liberal theory more broadly with two major challenges: the inability to meaningfully and adequately address comprehensive doctrines like religious metaphysics on the one hand, and the outright undermining of those very rational foundations by the forces of global capitalism on the other. And a country like Egypt proves especially vulnerable to these two crises in liberalism: liberal rationality, as we have articulated throughout this chapter, has been deeply inhospitable to the crucial role religious metaphysics have played, and continue to play, in Egyptian society. And just as importantly, neo-liberal economic policies, from the Sadat era’s policy of economic Opening (al-Infitah) of the country to the forces of global capitalism onward, have brought untold suffering on the middle and lower classes of Egyptian society.
Regrettably, though, contemporary Egyptian liberals have thus far proven unwilling to even acknowledge these two challenges in liberal theory, much less attempt to address them on either a theoretical or practical level – owing, we submit, to their dogmatic commitment to authoritarian modernism, and by extension to ideological statism. For, as we have seen, statism has consistently been the basis by which liberals have forcibly extirpated religious influences in public life in the name of maintaining a supposedly rational order. Furthermore, statism represents precisely the antithesis of the independent politics Badiou maintains is necessary to overcome the contradictions produced by liberal rationalism’s incestuous relationship with global capitalism. Reconciling the liberal project in Egypt, needless to say, will necessitate addressing these challenges.
On what basis, then, will Egyptian liberals seek to find a new means of saving liberal theory in general? Will they reconfigure liberal rationalism altogether? And, if so, how will this newly reformed liberal rationality, if at all possible, yield a new view of the state? And to what extent will this new form of rational state succeed in addressing, rather than forcibly suppressing, the intellectual pluralism of the Islamic legal system articulated earlier? Put another way, saving liberalism in Egypt will require that Egyptian liberals find a proper basis for contextualizing liberal rationalism beyond its classical Protestant origins in Europe, in a way that does justice to the immanent social and cultural realities of Egypt. The liberal project in Egypt, as originally articulated by Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, failed precisely because it ignored those immanent realities, attempting to forcibly superimpose the European experience on the Egyptian one. The past century of the Egyptian liberal experiment, culminating most recently in liberal complicity with the return of authoritarianism under Sisi in 2013, and the acquiescence of even the worst excesses of the new military regime – namely liberal support for the Rabaa massacre – adequately demonstrates that such an approach is bound to fail.
If these radical challenges are to be seriously accepted, Egyptian liberals may find it more edifying, paradoxically enough, to have a constructive dialectic with their erstwhile adversaries in the Islamists – who face a no less serious challenge of revisiting the origins of their political project and its ultimate aims. In so doing, it may very well be that both will inaugurate a new vision capable of transcending their statist myopia, and in turn initiate a new era that is not only, respectively, Post-Islamist and post-liberal, but ultimately post-statist.
1 The authors would like to express their deepest appreciation to Dr. Joel Gordon (University of Arkansas), Dr. William Reddy (Duke University), and Dr. Daniel Tutt (Marymount University) for their insightful commentary and feedback on previous chapter iterations.
2 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
3 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
4 See Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1978–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 103–92.
5 Abdeslam M. Maghraoui, Liberalism Without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 66–7.
6 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).
7 There are some exceptions in this respect, particularly later figures like Taha Husayn and Salama Musa.
8 Roel Meijer, The Quest for Modernity: Secular Liberal and Left-Wing Political Thought in Egypt, 1945–1958 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 16.
9 Maghraoui, Liberalism Without Democracy, 88–9.
10 Ibid., 89.
11 “Al-Turuq al-Sufiyya: Mukhalafat Rijaluha li al-din, Wajib al-Mashikha wa Wajib al-Hukuma,” Kawkab al-Sharq, November 6, 1926, I, quoted in Maghraoui, Liberalism Without Democracy, 99.
12 Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, 22.
13 Ibid., 38.
14 Ibid., 52–3.
15 Ibid., 55.
16 Ruz al-Yusuf, February 11, 1952, p. 3, quoted in Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 33.
17 Meijer, The Quest for Modernity, 145.
18 Ibid., 156.
19 Ibid., 153.
20 Ibid., 186–7.
21 Ibid., 213–14.
22 See in particular 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).
23 See, for instance, Charles D. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1983).
24 See in particular Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
25 See John Esposito, Islam and Politics (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 33–59. See also Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 103–92; and Muhammad Qasim Zaman and Roxanne Euben, Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–49.
26 See Muhammad ‘Imara, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani Muqiz al-Sharq wa al-Gharb (Cairo: Dar al-Shorouq, 1988), 265–80.
27 See Muhammad Rashid Rida, Al-Khilafa (Cairo: Dar al-Nashr Liljami‘at, 2013).
28 See Hasan al-Banna, “Toward The Light,” in Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden, ed. Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 74.
29 Ibid., 75–7.
30 See Chapter 4 in Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 95–128. See Janice Bodey, “Purity and Conquest in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,” in Dirt, Undress and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface, ed. Adeline Masquelier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). See also Chapter 7, “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, ed. Talal Asad (Stanford: Stanford University, Press, 2003), 205–57; and Wilson C. Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity (1870–1940) (Duke: Duke University Press, 2011).
31 See Wael Hallaq, Introduction to Islamic Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapters 1–3.
32 See Averroes, The Decisive Treatise (trans. Charles Butterworth) (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2001), 8–22.
33 See Al-Juwayni, Ghiyath al-Umam fi Iltiyath al-zulam (Jeddah: Dar al-Minhaj, 2009), 160–203.
34 Ibid., 73–88.
35 Ibid., 87.
36 Ibid., 78.
37 Ibid., 77.
38 Ibid., 72.
39 See Sayyid Qutb, Al-Mustaqbal li-hadha al-Din (Cairo: Dar al-Shorouq, 1993), 5–23.
40 See Sayyid Qutb, Nahw Mujtama‘ Islami (Cairo: Dar al-Shorouq, 1993), 152.
41 See Qutb, Al-Mustaqbal li-hadha al-Din, 43–96.
42 Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 83.
43 Ibid., 86–7.
44 See Sayyid Qutb, Ma‘rakit al-Islam wa al-Ra’smaliyya (Cairo: Dar al-Shorouq: 1993), 36–62, 109–12.
45 For more on pragmatism in al-Banna, see his epistle “Are We Practical People?” (hal nahnu qawmun ‘amaliyyun), in Majmu‘at rasa’il al-Imam al-Banna (Cairo: Dar al-Tawzi‘ wa-al-Nashr al-Islamiyah, 2006), 77–118.
46 See Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 97–119.
47 Ibid., 96.
48 Ibid., 248–57.
49 Ibid., 260–72.
50 Ibid., 271.
51 Ibid., 280–1.
52 Ibid., 260.
53 Ibid., 196–246.
54 Ashraf El-Sherif, “The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s failures,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 1, 2014, http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/07/01/egyptian-muslim-brotherhood-s-failure/i2bl
55 Ibid.
56 See Wickham, The Muslim Brotherhood, 196–206.
57 See Asef Bayat, “The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society,” Critique, 1996, 43–52.
58 See Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 194–204.
59 Bayat defines Islamism as follows: “I take Islamism to refer to those ideologies and movements that strive to establish some kind of an ‘Islamic order’ – religious state, shari‘a law, moral codes in Muslim societies and communities. Association with the state is a key feature of Islamist politics...” See Asef Bayat, “Post-Islamism at Large,” in Post Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, ed. Asef Bayat (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3.
60 See Bayat, “Post-Islamism at Large,” 3–32.
61 Ibid., 8.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 8.
64 Ibid., 29.
65 Hallaq moves on to argue that, insofar as the modern nation-state is predicated on a wholly European historical experience, it produces a political subjectivity that is fundamentally at odds with the subjectivity produced under an Islamic epistemic framework, thus rendering the conception of an “Islamic state” modeled on the modern nation-state paradigm an impossibility and an anachronism. See Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
66 See, for instance, the Agamben’s critique of the failures of the modern liberal state and its contradictions in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
67 See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular in Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
68 See ‘Part I’ John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 7–48.
69 See Part I of John Rawls, Justice as Fairness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3–38.
70 For Kant’s discussion of positive, intellectual freedom as the rational basis of the exercise of autonomy in an enlightened society and progress in history, see “What is Enlightenment?” “Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” and “What is Orientation in Thinking?” in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
71 Consider Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal theorists in general and Neo-Kantian political theorists in particular in Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 16–52.
72 See Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the public sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (April 1, 2006): 1–25.
73 See Alain Badiou, “The Democratic Emblem,” in Democracy in What State?, ed. Giorgio Agamben (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 13.
74 Ibid., 14.
75 Ibid., 15.