Jim Morrison died on 3 July, as young as most of the casualties of the Egyptian revolution of 2011-13 (let's assume it's been one string of events for simplicity's sake). Play a few Doors songs to honour him while you think of bloodied corpses and try as you might not to, at some point you will begin to picture the killers. And going through who they have been — police, military, thugs, honourable citizens, Islamists — you will soon end up blaming everyone and everything. Not without reason. While comforting at first, the discourse of martyrdom (and it has already been sullied in many ways and on various occasions) does not detract from the absolutely unforgivable horror of unnecessary loss of life. And while death of protest may not be exactly murder, it is. The reason I've been thinking of Jim Morrison is that death of protest has been happening again recently, this time at the hands of Islamist militias or quasi-militias: totalitarian theocrats defending democratic legitimacy against Egypt's second coupvolution in three years. Such Kafkaesque insanity is perfectly normal in Egypt. But second indeed: considering the army's role in 25 January, there is no sane reason to set 30 June apart from that initial, equally military-facilitated uprising. Death's made angels of some more young (and old) people — notably in the Cairo neighbourhood of Manial and the Alexandria neighbourhood of Sidi Bishr — but this time it's made murderous demons of a new and thus far “revolutionary” sect. And while that sect is no doubt demonic and murderous regardless, there is something truly Egyptian about the upshot. By Egyptian I mean not only contradictory, inconsistent, inconclusive, hypocritical, arbitrary and irresponsible but also something specific over and above all this, perhaps more obvious for society's newfound unity against the sect in question, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) than ever before in the course of our terrible political spring. At each step of the way there emerges a good man in charge, a representative of revolution; and then this happens: First, they identify the culprit — the scapegoat. Second, rather than unequivocally incriminating the scapegoat by resorting to the rule of law, they divide that culprit into two: the powerful evil-doer, and the weak instrument of evil. Third, they glorify that second avatar of the scapegoat, identifying it not with the killer but with the killed. Fourth, ignoring both the weak instrument and the victim of evil, they continue to delay bringing evil itself to justice. Fifth, they begin to stress their willingness to negotiate with evil, as if to prove that it is only in reality a scapegoat, nothing more. Sixth, they bring in allies of that scapegoat to help them with negotiations. Seventh, they take long enough doing that to let the culprit manoeuvre and regroup. Eighth, they become the target of new, often scapegoat-sympathetic protests themselves, having clearly contributed to obstructing justice. Ninth, they are forced to use violence against protesters, thereby exposing themselves to the danger of becoming the next scapegoat. Tenth, they lash out against the least guilty party in a vain attempt to put a stop to protests — and then they have to be replaced. It cannot be stressed enough in context that Islamists should have no right to practise politics in a democracy, especially a nascent democracy; it's as simple as that. I think it's been demonstrated sufficiently that Islamists are bad news for every aspect of life including Islam, something society seems to have become aware of a year into the now deposed president Morsi's presidency. Perhaps I should also mention my own disgust with “puritanical” revolutionary, activist and pro-rights positions which, having facilitated the army-managed rise of Islamism every step of the way since the first coup while only ever calling it a revolution, now have the nerve to decry the army-managed fall of the Islamists by popular consent, refusing to call the second uprising anything but a coup. “The coup and crackdown”, one activist recently tweeted; and knowing there had been absolutely no crackdown to date, for hours all I could think of was slapping the young man. None of this changes the fact that, however much the MB and/or their Palestinian arm, Hamas, might have been covertly involved in massacres during the year and a half preceding Morsi's rise to power, it seems just as insane how every other party involved in the death of protesters and citizens at or near protests during that time has been summarily absolved of all responsibility. None of it changes the fact that, while it was the MB who provided all manner of other Islamists with political cover, the bad news has been at least as much about those other Islamists — including, first and foremost, the Salafist Nour Party — as about the MB. The Salafist Nour Party took no position on 30 June, instead of taking the position that was clearly expected of them: to support Mohamed Morsi. And how that explains their having so ridiculously much clout in the ensuing, army-overseen arrangements is completely beyond me. But, far from the possibility that this is yet another rerun of the same sickening scenario in which generals and mullahs manage to render the sacrifices and hopes of the people null and void, leaving the economy and security in a worse state without in any way resolving political issues — far from the possibility that we are fast approaching full-blown civil war — my point is rather the specifically Egyptian tendency to make this happen with or without the aid of generals and mullahs. I'm talking about the way in which the MB is sending out members and supporters in the guise of counter-protesters to kill pro-coupvolution people all over the country is being dealt with while the Nour Party, the MB's actual former and forever strategic ally by any standard, is allowed to obstruct the formation of an interim cabinet to get the country on its feet again (because the Nour Party's approval of the figure to head that cabinet is indispensable?) The prefix “counter” is important, for the Protest of Support — elsewhere a contradiction in terms, seen only in increasingly extinct totalitarian societies and then only in the form of a people's rally, not a demonstration or a protest — is an integral part of the Egyptian political scene by now; and it is always in the presence of counter-protesters that people get killed. In the past society was divided, and so the response played out among different groups of people in different ways. In the present unity of the Islamist-less majority, and it is very a much a majority, is the strength to give up on diagnosing the failure of the army or the interim presidency to do what must be done and engage instead with the body of the Islamist. *** Jim Morrison died in 1971, just as the late president Anwar Al-Sadat was beginning to reverse Gamal Abdel-Nasser's anti-MB policies in the attempt to deploy Islamists in his little cold war against the Left, including Nasserists. Islamists would eventually kill Sadat himself, and wage war on the state for quite some time under Hosni Mubarak, targeting tourists and the police. They would also carry out assassinations of independent figures who had been declared unbelievers by Islamist sheikhs. Many such characters, in prison under Mubarak, were released by presidential pardon after Morsi came to power — and they have been instrumental, where death of protest is concerned, in shifting the emphasis away from the army and towards systematically violent and armed counter-protesters taking steps to safeguard the Islamist monopoly on power. For the longest time, prior to that point, it was easy to absolve even those citizens who were party to killing protesters of responsibility, on the premise that the evil was the work of state power, whether in the form of police, police-controlled militias or the army. It has been thanks as much to news of Syria as to the MB in power — to the work of Islamists and Islamist-controlled militias at the presidential palace protest in December 2012 — that one is increasingly aware that state power will always be preferable to civil conflict. Remembering the Palestinian suicide bombing craze of previous decades, one has also become aware of a relatively straightforward fact: The body of the Islamist is an instrument of death. From its strict observance of prohibitions unnecessary even by the dictates of the creed to its relative readiness to instantly forgo the world for the hereafter, from its reduction of moral experience to the material and the physical to its belief in physically eliminating unbelievers — its contempt for the right to live — it seems to me the body of the Islamist has far less to do with life than death; and that is partly why it feels far worse to be subject to “Islamic” than even military suppression... *** Ironically, while pondering the difference between the body of the protester killed by the soldier and the body of the protester killed by (or along with) the Islamist as I write this through a sleepless night, in the small hours news suddenly arrives of Islamist counter-protesters killed in clashes with the Republican Guard, at whose headquarters they have been holding a sit-in since the official deposition of Morsi, because the deposed president, it is said, is detained there. The number of casualties eventually emerges as 42; and my Facebook timeline begins to fill with pro-coupvolution arguments over whether the killing of 42 Islamists, even if they were armed, could ever be justified or explained. For many the event is a painful reminder of the Islamist-supported military crimes committed prior to Morsi's election to office, and it raises two questions that bring both the tentative optimism I have enjoyed since 30 June and my ponderings to an abrupt end. First, the deeper contradiction in someone who, having called for and got the support of the army to depose an Islamist government, will suddenly blame the army for defending him against Islamists: this seems to raise moral issues far more complex and interesting than the question of whether killing can be justified as such. It also raises the question of civil strife in an as yet unprecedented way. My feeling, which I translate into a status update without thinking, is that you cannot blame the soldier who does the killing considering you might very plausibly have been in that soldier's shoes — if you live in Manial, for example, you may well have been, only without the same means to defend yourself — and that it is ultimately the existence of a unified army that safeguards the Egyptian state at this juncture. Secondly, is it any longer a question of the body of the protester (or even the body of the Islamist who, counter or not, whatever his intentions, is successfully casting himself in the role of the dissenting citizen suppressed by military power)? Is it rather a question of an organised political force aiming to supplant not the pre-25 January regime but the entire Egyptian state? Wouldn't the more sensible position in the latter case be to support even a corrupt or murderous army against a force very like a foreign invasion? I have been able to place myself in the shoes of army officers shooting at Islamists and I must admit I would have fared no more merciful. I have been unable to place myself in the shoes of the (counter-)protesters not so much because they are Islamists per se but because they are anti-coupvolution. It goes without saying that I am concerned for the immediate future of life in Egypt, but this — a meditation on death of protest turned immediate testimony — is all I have to say. *** Death makes angels of the dead but only once they have died (I will add this much). The living, death makes demons of, just as civil war turns compatriots into mortal enemies. Unless I lose my life much sooner than I think I will, it is too late to be an angel now.
