Egypt in Political Crisis

For his part General Abdel Fattah Sisi may have been driven to this drastic move by a distrust of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ability to handle the Islamist project and his belief that Morsi was endangering it by moving too far, too hard and too fast to consolidate power. An Islamist but also a nationalist, Sisi’s views are possibly more aligned with those of the Salafi Nour Party and the pre-2011 Revolution quietist philosophy of transforming Egyptian society from within. In a 2006 thesis he wrote while studying at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania he made the case for a democratic government with an Islamic basis - an Islamist democracy.

This in turn means that Egypt is nowhere near its post-Islamist phase. Though appointing a government of secularists, Sisi insisted on retaining the foremost Islamist tenets of the suspended constitution, though it is not clear that he retained its vesting of the clergy, rather than the state, with the power to interpret laws as Shari’a compliant. Nor did ordinary Egyptians reject the Brotherhood government for ideological reasons: they did so because of its dictatorial style and economic failure. Still, the two Islamist parties’ 75% majority in the first stage of the 2011-12 presidential elections seems to have dropped to just a plurality. Only half the electorate voted in the second phase, and only a little more than half voted for Morsi; an even smaller percentage favored the constitutional changes proposed by the Islamists last December.

All in all, Mr. Stock suggested that, as Robert Springborg wrote in a recent article, Sisi’s Egypt could be heading toward a hybrid system of Islamism and militarism along the Pakistani model rather than a post-Islamist phase.