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Egypt The Limits of Incorporation: The Rise of Political Islam and the Continuing Role of Repression
The social base of the state under Sadat and Mubarak was
undoubtedly narrower than it had been under Nasser. In some ways,
it was more solid. It rested on the hard-core support of the most
strategic social force, the bourgeoisie, which had a major stake in
its survival, and it at least partially incorporated elements of
the opposition through the party/interest group structure created
under limited liberalization. Yet, although the parties articulated
interests, they did not, as in strong party systems, incorporate a
large mobilized public or the interests of the masses into the
making of public policies. There was still an institutional gap
between public wishes and policy outcomes; decisions, still made in
limited elite circles, therefore enjoyed too little societal
support. Moreover, the regime still lacked the ideological
legitimacy to win the loyalty of the masses. By the middle of the
1980s, as economic expansion gave way to austerity, the challenge
of mass control became ever more burdensome. The limits of the
regime's capacity to incorporate dissident factions left the door
open to the rise of a counterelite in the form of the Islamic
movement, and the regime had to continue to rely on coercion and
repression to stave off dissent and rebellion.
The development of the Islamic movement in the 1980s was the
most significant change in the political arena and one with the
potential to transform the system. Sadat originally unleashed the
movement against his leftist opponents, but as Westernization and
the infitah advanced, the Islamic movement became a vehicle
of opposition, sometimes violent, to his regime. He attempted to
curb it, but under Mubarak it took on new dimensions. The more
violent messianic groups, such as Al Jihad, were the targets of
continual repression and containment, apparently only partly
successful. Their destabilizing potential was indicated by their
role in the assassination of Sadat, a major rebellion they mounted
in Asyut at that time, a 1986 wave of attacks on video shops and
Westernized boutiques, and assassination attempts against high
officials. The regime responded by arresting thousands of these
radical activists. Another Islamic group, the Jamaat al Islamiyah,
recovered the control of the student unions Sadat tried to break.
In the mid-1980s, they won twice the number of votes of the NDP in
student union elections, and the secular opposition was squeezed
out. The left made inroads in their dominance toward the end of the
decade, however. Radical groups belonging to Jamaat al Islamiyah
tried to impose a puritanical, sometimes anti-Coptic, Islamic
regime on the campuses and in the towns of Upper Egypt, where local
government sometimes bowed to their demands. More moderate groups
in Jamaat al Islamiyah could turn out large disciplined crowds for
public prayer, the nearest thing to a mass demonstration that the
regime reluctantly permitted. A major contest was waged over
Egypt's 40,000 mosques; the government sought to appoint imams but
had too few reliable candidates, while the movement sought to wrest
control of these major potential centers of Islamic propaganda.
The influence of Islamic groups in poor urban neighborhoods
seemed to grow in the 1980s. In 1985 when parliament rejected
immediate application of the sharia, Islamic agitation led by
Shaykh Hafiz Salama swept Cairo, and in the late 1980s bitter
clashes occurred in Ayn Shams between a kind of Islamic "shadow
government" there and the security forces. Although Islamic
militants were certainly a minority and were even resented by a
good portion of the public, their activism in a largely passive
political arena gave them great power. The government tried to
drive a wedge between the more militant youth groups and the
Islamic mainstream; thus, in 1989 Shaykh Muhammad Mutwalli Sharawi,
a prestigious and popular preacher, was brought to denounce the use
of violence in the name of Islam.
The Islamic mainstream, possessed of increasing cohesion,
organization, and mobilizational capability, rapidly took advantage
of the legitimate channels of activity opened by the regime under
Mubarak. The mainstream Muslim Brotherhood and its conservative
cousins were incorporated into parliament; they infiltrated the
parties, the judiciary, and the press; and they generally put
secular forces on the defensive. The more the secular opposition
proved impotent to wrest a share of power from the regime, the more
dissidents seemed to turn to political Islam as the only viable
alternative. A dramatic indicator of this was the substantial
representation Islamists won in the professional syndicates,
especially the doctors' union, traditionally bastions of the
liberal, upper-middle class; only the lawyers' and journalists'
unions resisted their sway. Victories indicative of Islamic
influence included the reversal of Sadat's law of personal status
that gave women some modest rights, a decision by certain state
companies to cease hiring women so they could take their "proper
place in the home," and a constitutional amendment making sharia
the sole basis of legislation. Islamic sentiment and practices were
widespread in the 1980s. Filling the vacuum left by the withering
of state populism, the Islamic movement constructed an alternative
social infrastructure--mosques, clinics, cooperatives--to bring the
masses under Islamic leadership.
The movement was backed by the power of Islamic banking and
investment houses, an enigmatic development that possibly was
filling the gap left by the decline of the state economy. Claiming
to represent an alternative economic way, these Islamic banks
initially seemed better positioned than government or foreign banks
to mobilize the savings of ordinary people. Yet, while the Islamic
movement grew up in opposition to Westernization and the
infitah, these institutions were linked to entrepreneurs
enriched in the oil states who made huge profits on the same
international connections and through many of the same speculative
financial, black-market, and tertiary enterprises infitah
had encouraged. As scandals shook public confidence in them, the
government moved to curb their autonomy. But their tentacles
reached into the political system. They were major contributors to
the ruling NDP and had forged alliances with the New Wafd Party and
the Islamic Alliance as well. It was unclear by 1990 whether the
effect of Islamic banking institutions would be to incorporate
ordinary Egyptians into a more indigenous, broader-based capitalism
adjusted to the infitah regime, to provide the economic
basis for an alternative socio-political order, or to prove a mere
flash in the pan. The regime's mix of hostility and wary tolerance
toward them suggested it was not sure itself.
The Islamic movement thus emerged as a powerful cross-class
political alliance, a potential counterestablishment. As its
economic and political power grew, however, there were signs that
its antiregime populism was being overshadowed by the emergence of
a bourgeois leadership preaching conservative values: class
deference, respect for elders, female submission, the right to a
fair profit, and the superiority of the private sector. To the
extent that its program thus became indistinguishable, except in
symbolism, from regime policies, a gap threatened to separate this
leadership from its plebeian following, splitting or enervating the
movement. If the bourgeois leadership prevailed, the outcome was
likely to be a gradual cooptation of the Islamic movement and
Islamization of the regime rather than Islamic revolution.
To the extent control mechanisms proved inadequate, a role
remained for coercion and repression in the political system. Under
Nasser coercive controls were very tight although largely directed
at the upper class and limited numbers of middle-class opposition
activists. Sadat initially relaxed controls, particularly over the
bourgeoisie, but when opposition became too insistent, he did not
hesitate to repress it. His massive 1981 purge showed how quickly
the regime could change from conciliation to repression. Under the
more tolerant Mubarak regime, political freedoms were still
unequally enjoyed. Dissent within regime institutions was
tolerated, but when it crossed the line into mass action--such as
Islamic street demonstrations for implementation of sharia and
anti-Israeli protests--it was regularly repressed. Strikes were
also regularly smashed with the use of force. The regime continued
to round up leftist and Islamic dissidents, charging them with
belonging to illegal organizations or spreading antigovernment
propaganda, apparently part of a strategy to keep dissent within
manageable bounds. Indeed, the regime went so far as to arrest
whole families of political dissidents and to hold them as virtual
hostages in order to pressure suspects to surrender.
The security apparatus, more massive than ever, contained the
main episodes of violent challenge to the regime--notably the food
riots and localized Islamic uprisings at Sadat's death. The
Ministry of Interior presided over several coercive arms including
the General Directorate for State Security Investigations (GDSSI),
the domestic security organization, and the gendarmerie-like
Central Security Forces; behind the police stood the army itself
(see Internal Security
, ch. 5). But there were signs that these
forces were neither totally reliable nor effective. In the 1977
riots, the army reputedly refused to intervene unless the
government rescinded the price rises, and scattered Nasserite and
Islamic dissidence in the military continued in the 1980s. There
were rivalries between the army and the Ministry of Interior, and
disagreements inside the latter over whether dialogue or the iron
fist could best deal with opposition. In 1986 the CSF itself
revolted. Although the rebellion had no political program and was
mainly sparked by worsening treatment of the lower ranks, it
signaled that the use of conscripts from the poorest sectors of
society to contain radical opposition to a bourgeois regime was
ever more risky. Yet the regime continued thereafter to use the CSF
against students, strikers, and Islamic militants. Finally, the
assassination of Sadat after his crackdown on the opposition showed
that coercion could run two ways; according to its perpetrators,
their purpose was "to warn all who come after him and teach them a
lesson."
Data as of December 1990
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