Four Scenarios
Last week Mohamed Rifaah al-Tahtawi resigned as spokesman for Al-Azhar, the seat of the Sunni clerical establishment in Cairo. Mohamed Rifaah is twice over an establishment figure. He spent a career in the foreign service as an ambassador and deputy to the foreign minister; after retirement in December 2009, he moved to the office of the grand sheikh of Al-Azhar.
“This youth movement changed our horizon. I didn’t expect it. I underestimated it,” Mohammed Rifaah told me, explaining his decision to renounce his job and join the revolutionaries. “This is a time to take sides, and I have taken sides.”
He invited me to join him on the curb in an alley off Tahrir Square, behind the makeshift hospital. “Welcome to my office,” he joked. “We are all revolutionaries now.”
He outlined four possible scenarios for the current political standoff:
- Soft transition. Under pressure from the United States and from regime insiders, Mubarak passes power to a more palatable member of the establishment and makes real, but incomplete, reforms to the system. Egypt’s foreign policy would remain unchanged.
- Tahrir Square becomes Hyde Park. The revolutionaries lose their connection to society at large and are allowed to continue their protest, but with marginal impact. The regime wins a war of attrition, and returns “with all its savagery, to take its revenge.”
- Tiananmen Square/Paris Commune. The regimes wipes out the protesters and faces no wider nationwide revolt in response.
- Radicalization. The regime gives no ground and in response the revolutionaries resort to force. The regime falls, along with the system it has built, and is replaced by a popular government after a destructive confrontation.
There are surely other scenarios, but Mohamed Rafaah’s breakdown of the alternatives is instructive. In his view, time does not necessarily favor the regime.
