Lessons from the Brotherhood

Surely Nawaz Sharif is empathising with fallen President Morsi of Egypt to some extent. Some aspects of the recent events in Egypt are a revisitation of the events of Pakistan in 1999, when military chief Gen Musharraf overthrew the adventurist and conservative PML-N government and declared himself saviour of the nation who would gift us a controlled democracy. As in Egypt, such claims led to a debate over whether it was a coup or a doctrine of necessity.
There are of course, significant differences. Unlike Musharraf’s coup, it is being argued that the Tamarod campaign against Morsi has been people-led and is a culmination of the questioning of the legitimacy of the post-Arab spring elections. This scepticism is shared by serious analysts across the Maghreb, including those from the Arab left. Regardless, just as in 1999, my personal position is clear.
If elections are fairly free, the terms of even the most authoritarian governments, while they must be vociferously challenged all the while, must be completed. Under no circumstances should the military or any other institution be allowed to overthrow elected legislatures – conservative, liberal, theocratic or atheist.
It was only after a decade into Musharraf’s rule of supposed enlightened moderation that the people of Pakistan finally realised the contradiction behind what is euphemistically called a benevolent military rule. Too many champions of democracy had cheered, welcomed and cooperated with the Musharraf government making the same kind of excuses that Egyptian progressives are repeating today. To my mind, this support postponed the restoration of democracy and in the process too many lives were sacrificed – from the unsuspecting victims of domestic terrorism as well as that afflicted due to the US led war on terror waged across Pakistani soil. They know who they are.
Many of these permanently available ‘democrats’ served Musharraf’s government, then the PPP and now the PML-N with equal enthusiasm and no moral qualms. However, most importantly, the religious parties that ruled in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa over those years discredited themselves and can offer no excuses, nor claim victimisation – they failed because they are authoritarian social engineers, not able political representatives.
To be fair, the temptation to stem the swell of conservative theocracies (even if they’re democratically elected) by a liberal intervention (even if it’s by the army) is not a simple moral choice to dismiss as some western commentators make it out to be. Conservative theocracies can wreak indelible damage to the cultural and legal fabric of the country and are incredibly hard to reverse. In the case of Pakistan, the theocratic dictatorship of Ziaul Haq is wreaking continuous havoc on the socio-cultural and legal fabric and sucks us back every time we seek to vault ourselves into the new century.
The Brotherhood’s prosecutorial bent against minorities and attempts at the erasure of civil rights did not help its cause yet, as in Pakistan, the people really need to understand that military intervention is not an alternative and definitely not a guarantor of freedoms in the long term. When the Brotherhood pretended to reinvent itself as the Freedom and Justice Party and signed IMF agreements it confirmed that, while rabidly illiberal with reference to their anti-women and anti-minority commitment, Islamist parties everywhere are economically ultraliberal to the core. However, since Pakistanis who critique religious politics are suspected as anti-Muslim imperialist collaborators, it would help to quote the most experienced Marxist commentator on Egypt to back this up.
Argues Samir Amin, “Islamists have only ultraliberal answers to give to the crisis: they have replaced the capitalists’ bourgeois clique that were Mubarak’s friends with reactionary businessmen. Moreover, their goal is quite simply to sell off public goods. The Brotherhood is hated by Egyptians because it continues with the same policies as its predecessor.”
The notion that Islamic political parties are alternatives, more indigenous and innately anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist is a myth that has been implied and flirted with by several self-styled new left scholars. The economic performance of the religious right is almost never empirically cited nor analysed in order to make this point. Instead, such scholarship relies on ethnographic embroidery and refers to the legitimacy of Islamists’ electoral performance and not their actual governance.
In some cases, the fact that Islamist parties uphold neo-liberal economic policies of the secular parties confirms for these scholars that these religious parties are really quite wordly! So why not accept their religious consumerism and engagement with the market as a sign of their temporal legitimacy? But what about the substance of their policies, which abide the neo-liberal line?
Even in terms of foreign policy, Samir Amin considers Morsi a puppet, “a mere instrument of the murshid’s will – that of Mohammed Badie, Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood” – and argues that the Brotherhood is a supporter of Israel despite its deceptive anti-Zionist front.
Based on his own experiences, Mian Nawaz Sharif should recognise that average citizens usually reject both – religious politics and ultra-liberal economics. In fact, in breaking this connection may lie the answer to military intervention and its vested economic interests that prompt repeat interference in democratic governance.
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com