Only after all attempts to persuade the Muslim Brotherhood to disperse their sit-ins in Nasr City's Rabaa Al-Adaweya and Giza's Nahda Square in Cairo and other squares in various Egyptian cities had failed did the Egyptian army and police move in to disperse these sit-ins by force. The events that followed confirmed that the demonstrators possessed weapons, including guns, RBG rifles, grenades and Molotov cocktails, belying claims reiterated by Brotherhood leaders and their supporters that they had been exercising their lawful right to peaceful protest. Many hundreds have died in the confrontations that have swept the country since the clampdown on the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins. Over 100 of the victims were police and soldiers. The number of the wounded exceeds 10,000. These casualties will continue to climb if the Brotherhood persists in its acts of destruction and in its belligerent marches in which some participants visibly brandish all sorts of weapons. I myself was an eyewitness to just such a march during my leave last week, which I spent in Alexandria. A march set off from the city's Qaed Ibrahim Mosque and proceeded along the Corniche in the direction of the central squares of Manshiya and Raml Station. Along the way, the demonstrators fired live ammunition, vandalised stores and cars, attacked coffeehouses and pedestrians, and generally wreaked havoc, destruction and terror as they shouted “peacefulness is dead”. At one point, they pulled a taxi driver out of his vehicle and slaughtered him on the spot simply because a photograph of General Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi had been taped to his car window. Muslim Brotherhood leaders opted for a futile and unrealistic position from the outset of their sit-ins. In total denial of the overwhelming tide of public opinion that expressed itself on 30 June and on subsequent days, they insisted on the reinstatement of dismissed former president Mohamed Morsi, asserting that the army intervention on 3 July in favour of the popular will and the declaration of a new roadmap to democracy constituted a “coup against legitimacy”. For many months there had been a mounting tide of anger and resentment against the Muslim Brotherhood, its political wing the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the Morsi government because of its inability to address the mounting economic strains that were pressing on the bulk of Egypt's populace. Prices were soaring, there were shortages of food staples, and petrol stations were closing due to fuel shortages. At the political level, too, opponents to Morsi charged that he had never acted as a president for all Egyptians, but rather has been an instrument to serve the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood from which he hailed. They argued that he had lent himself to the process known as the “Brotherhoodisation” of the state by promoting fellow Brotherhood members and supporters to key positions of power. Accordingly, he had betrayed the oath he had taken to safeguard and promote the interests of the Egyptian nation and all its citizens. In defence of their “coup against legitimacy” claim, the Muslim Brotherhood hold that Morsi was the first civilian Egyptian president to be elected in polls that were universally deemed to be free and fair. In the post-25 January 2011 phase, in which Egypt was making a transition to democracy, it was essential to let the voice of the ballot box, as opposed to the voice of demonstrations and rallies in the streets, prevail, they argued. As for the group's inability to address the country's various economic, social and security problems, the Muslim Brotherhood alternatively attributed these problems to the intervention of the military establishment, to a lack of expertise and to a range of other causes. On the whole, they said, a single year in power was not long enough to judge the president's performance. But valid though they may be, the arguments cited by both camps do not touch on the real origins of the crisis. The millions who turned out to protest against Morsi could probably have been persuaded to give him another chance and to work with him constructively to solve Egypt's problems if they had believed that he was in fact the country's ruler. However, this was not the case, as is testified to by chants such as “down with the government of the supreme guide” and “down with Muslim Brotherhood rule” that were heard in protests across the country. It was amply clear that the majority of Egyptians believed that Morsi was no more than a façade for a group hardly noted for its patriotic loyalty. The Muslim Brotherhood's foremost allegiance was to its own “universal mission”, and this was clearly and provocatively expressed by its own supreme guide on one occasion. Egyptians might have been counselled to patience had they believed that democratic legitimacy, to the Muslim Brotherhood, meant more than just the ballot box, and only one ballot box in particular. It is worth looking closely at the presidential elections that are so central to the Brotherhood's legitimacy claim. As all those who have been keeping track of developments in Egypt know, last year's presidential elections were conducted in two rounds. In the first round, in which numerous candidates competed, the three front-runners were Morsi (5,764,952 votes), Ahmed Shafik (5,505,327 votes) and Hamdeen Sabahi (4,820,273 votes). In the second round, narrowed down to Morsi and Shafik, Morsi prevailed but by an extremely narrow margin. It is important to bear in mind the significance of the results of these two rounds. The first, in which Morsi obtained around 25 per cent of the vote, reflected the actual level of support the FJP and its candidate could muster in the face of a number of electoral rivals. It also reflected the great diversity of the political map in Egypt, a diversity that the Morsi presidency and the Muslim Brotherhood would subsequently ignore. The results of the second round were determined by other factors. The chief of these was that Morsi's challenger in this neck-to-neck contest was widely perceived as being the candidate of the “old regime” that the 25 January Revolution had been waged against. Clearly, a significant portion of the votes that put Morsi on top in that round came from the considerable number of voters who could not bring themselves to vote for Shafik. The Egyptian electorate had found itself in the unenviable position of having to chose between what was then regarded as the lesser of two evils. As the political activist and writer Abdel-Halim Kandil put it, Egyptians at the time were forced to choose between “shame” and “failure”, and they opted for the latter. His assessment encapsulates the blend of anger, resentment and confusion that prevailed at the time and helps explain the jumble of conflicting and contradictory positions. However, the votes that Morsi obtained in the second round of the presidential elections pale in comparison to the number of people who voted with their feet on 30 June this year to demand his ouster. Independent sources have estimated the number of protesters at more than 33 million, which seems to pull the rug out from under the argument that rests on the result of one set of elections as the source of Morsi's “legitimacy”. The Muslim Brotherhood has never had great democratic credentials. For much of its history it was opposed to the very concept of democracy, which it regarded as an imported Western heresy. In the 1930s, the then recently created Brotherhood took the Wafd Party's commitment to democracy as a reason to oppose it and as the justification for an anti-Wafd campaign that would eventually culminate in the assassination of some of the party's leaders by the Brotherhood's paramilitary “Secret Organisation”. In the 1990s, Abbas Madani, the leader of the Algerian National Salvation Front, an Islamist party, openly stated that his front would work to reach power through the polls, but that once it had succeeded it would establish an Islamic caliphate and abolish democratic elections. That attitude, which saw elections as a route to power and one to be used only once, was a major cause of the eruption of the conflict between the ruling military establishment in Algeria and the Islamist Front that eventually claimed more than 100,000 lives. The real losers from the front's self-serving attitude were the Algerian people themselves. Hamas behaved little differently in Gaza. After reaching power via the polls in 2006, it turned against the officially recognised Palestinian Authority and converted Gaza into an independent Islamic emirate in which there has not been an election of any sort for seven years. Hamas sees its territory as part of a revived Islamic caliphate, rather than as a part of Palestine that also includes the West Bank and Jerusalem. Also, according to the Hamas creed, the group's outlook is determined first and foremost by a provision in the movement's charter that states that it is a chapter of the International Muslim Brotherhood Organisation. My hope is that the patriotic resolve of the Egyptian people and their awareness of the need to close off avenues for terrorism and destruction will allow the interests of Egypt to prevail over hostile interests and lead to the victory of the state over the Muslim Brotherhood. I trust that, at this crucial and gruelling moment, people will bear in mind the words of the Islamic thinker Khaled Mohamed Khaled, who said that “any loyalty to religion that is unaided by loyalty to the nation is not of the spirit of God.”
