Thanassis Cambanis

Egyptian security forces strip and beat a protester in the Cabinet clashes of December 2011.

[Originally published in The Atlantic.]

CAIRO – History doesn’t operate in perfect analogies, but I couldn’t help comparing the celebration that marked President Morsi’s overthrow to the more exuberant outbreak when Hosni Mubarak fell.

Last week as I pushed past families, men blowing vuvuzelas, and candy peddlers, a policeman swaggered past in his white uniform, his belly and chin thrust forward, smiling ever so slightly. A man leapt toward him and brushed his forearm. “Congratulations, ya basha,” he said, in an almost feudal show of respect. The cop nodded in acknowledgement without breaking stride. He walked like a man with authority.

Two and a half years ago, one of the signal triumphs of the revolution was the expulsion not only of Mubarak, but of the detested police. They had strutted all over the rights and dignity of Egyptians. They had tortured with impunity, beaten the innocent and the guilty, detained at a whim, demanded bribes, colluded with common criminals. At the beginning of the uprising, the public had enshrined a magnanimous principle of people power; they won a street war and then declined to lynch the defeated policemen, instead in one instance releasing them to skulk home in their underwear.

On the night Mubarak fled the presidential palace, a 20-year-old engineering student named Mohammed Ayman murmured with awe and pleasure: “The policemen now speak more softly in the streets. People are waking up. We know our rights.”

This week, the policemen weren’t speaking softly at all. They were basking in the adoration of the latest, complicated wave of the Egyptian revolution. They joined the anti-Morsi protests, and stood by while Muslim Brotherhood facilities were attacked. In keeping with their motley history, rule of law still wasn’t on the police agenda. President Morsi was swept from power by vast reserves of popular anger at an inept and dictatorial Muslim Brotherhood government. But the June 30 uprising was by no means a purely organic revolt, like January 25; crucially, it was buttressed by the machinery of the old regime and the reactionaries who loved and missed it.

A few years hence, we’ll know for sure whether the July 2 military intervention represented a salutatory alliance between revolutionaries, the military, and the bureaucracy, or whether it marked the dawn of a full restoration of the old order, of Mubarak’s state without Mubarak. But revolutionaries and reformists obsessed today with convincing their fellow citizens and the world that Egypt just experienced a second revolution rather than a coup could more wisely concentrate on the omnipresent danger signs, which in the slim best-case scenario might not prove fatal..

If revolutionaries want to build a new better state, they now must quickly articulate their vision of a pluralistic society of rights and accountable government, free from the tyrannies they have overthrown in short order: those of Mubarak, the military junta that replaced him, and the elected Islamists who ruled as if their slim electoral majority entitled them to absolute, unchecked power. And they must be just as willing to challenge military rulers as they were to toss out Morsi and the Brotherhood.

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Egypt’s revolution is in danger, as it has been at many turns since it burst forth in January 2011. Its best asset is people power and the creative, resilient activists who have gone to the streets over and over, and against three different kinds of regime so far. Its greatest vulnerabilities are the institutions of Mubarak’s authoritarian police state, which have bided their time and are still pushing for a restoration, and the profound strain of reactionary thought that courses through certain powerful sectors of Egyptian society.

There are vibrant forces in Egypt that want to chart an indigenous, authentic course toward Egypt’s own version of pluralistic, transparent, accountable governance. They aren’t interested in Western timetables or Western ideas about elections as the path to enlightened rule. It is crucial, if these forces are to succeed, that they see and describe clearly the terrible impasse that led to June 30 and the highly flawed, imperfect military intervention that broke it.

With a clear-eyed, unsentimental assessment, Egyptian progressives might yet bend the country to their will. A positive long-term outcome requires honesty about the Brotherhood’s errors as well as the unseemly alliance struggling to tame Egypt now — in short, the whole halting attempt at revolution so farThe Brotherhood abused Egypt and its electoral prerogative. Most insulting was the constitution that was rammed through in a single overnight session, with only Islamist participation, in an obscene savagery of the political process. There was also the state-sanctioned torture and vigilantism against the anti-Morsi protesters outside the presidential palace in December 2012, committed by Muslim Brotherhood members with the knowledge of presidential advisers. In less dramatic fashion, the Brotherhood scoffed in lawmaking at the idea of consensus or negotiation, insisting again and again that the fact they’d been elected justified any and all actions, including the president’s abortive attempt to dissolve judicial oversight, the last remaining check on executive authority after the parliament had been sent packing by the courts.

The Brotherhood’s failures exhausted their warrant to govern in the eyes of many Egyptians, prompting the June 30 Tamarod, or “Rebel” revolt, which brought more people to the streets from more strains of the public than any previous Egyptian protest. But while the Muslim Brotherhood’s behavior might justify its eviction from power, it doesn’t excuse the misbehavior of the opposition, which is now the adjunct to the second interim military authority to set rules for Egypt’s political transition after Mubarak. The opposition has yet to settle on a constructive vision. It opposed Islamists, but as a body it hasn’t stood in favor of an alternate idea for Egypt. Some reconciliation is necessary with the felool, the remnants of the old regime. But accommodation is one thing; a full embrace another. Worse still, many of the Tamarod supporters actively called for a coup, declaring that military rule would be preferable to that of electoral Islamists. In fact, both have proved corrosive to Egyptian well-being, and will prove so again in the period to come. The latest machinations over the next government, along with the continuing violence between “rebels” and Brothers, underscore the precarious state of Egypt today, a mess out of which only the military is guaranteed to emerge stronger.

“We are starting from square zero,” said Basem Kamel, an activist who helped organize the January 25 uprising, and who joined the organizers of June 30. He conditionally supported this week’s military intervention, along with the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, for whom he served as a member of parliament in 2012. But he also condemned the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood leaders this week and the closure of their media. He doesn’t want anybody’s authoritarianism.

“This time,” he said, “we must get it right.”

Perhaps people power is a good enough argument for those who supported this people’s putsch. And the violence of Muslim Brotherhood followers only buttresses the argument that old regime remnants, the felool, might be illiberal fascists, but the Islamists hold a greater danger still. The Tamarod/June 30/Revolution-not-a-coup school seems to believe that their role is simply to expel any leader who doesn’t serve Egypt. Their argument appears to be that the people don’t need to write the blueprint, but will stand in reserve to veto any regime that misrules. Somebody else needs to come up with an idea for how to extricate Egypt from the practical morass into which it has sunk. Meanwhile, the people will overthrow executive after executive until one does a good job.

Yet, many ideals that imbued the original January 25 uprising have yet to gain a wider purchase. Revolutionaries rightly mistrusted authority, including that of the military. They rejected state propaganda that held divisions between secular and religious, Christian and Muslim, made Egypt ungovernable except by a heavy hand. They trusted the public, the amorphous “people,” to choose its own rules and write its own constitution, so long as everyone had a seat at the table and the strong couldn’t silence the weak. They espoused rights and due process for all, including accused criminals and thugs, even for those who had tortured and repressed them. They forswore the paranoia and xenophobia with which the old regime had tarred as foreign agents Egypt’s admirable community of human rights defenders, election monitors, and community organizers.

And now, at a moment of both pride and shame, when the people rose up against an authoritarian if elected Muslim Brotherhood governance and unseated a callous, incompetent president with the help of the military, the revolutionary ideas are drowning in a torrent of reactionary sentiment. “We want a military man to rule us,” a middle-aged woman with a bouffant hairdo exulted to me outside the presidential palace.

Yes, revolutionaries and common folk and apolitical Egyptians took to the streets on June 30, and again later in the week to celebrate Morsi’s imprisonment by the military. But they were joined, and perhaps overwhelmed in numbers, by the felool, the reactionaries. Families of soldiers and policemen strolled among the protesters. Christians and proud members of the “sofa party,” who had sat out every previous demonstration of the last two and a half years, trumpeted their support for Mubarak, for his preferred successor, presidential runner up and retired General Ahmed Shafiq, and now, for military rule. Whether the original revolutionaries wanted it or not, their latest revolution has the support of some of their worst, most persistent enemies: the military and the police.

At the airport on Friday evening, a half-dozen uniformed police officers stood watching the Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide’s speech, televised on a set mounted at the Coffeeshop Company. The Supreme Guide called for supporters of Morsi to “bring him back bearing him on our necks, sacrifice our souls for him.” Within hours, that cry would result in thousands marching to Tahrir Square and engaging in a bloody, deadly and avoidable clash with opponents of the Brotherhood.

As the Brotherhood leader spoke, the policemen laughed, while others looked on anxiously, mirroring the divisions within Egyptian society. Not everyone hates the Islamists, and not everyone loves the police.

On TV, the camera panned over the shouting Brotherhood supporters a few miles away, mourning a protester just shot dead. At the airport, an officer with three bars on his shoulder laughed. “Morsi’s finished,” he said, bringing his heel down and slowly savoring the crushing motion. “In two more days, the Brotherhood will be finished too.”

Beside him a stone-faced man winced.