By Mustafa Malik 

Alejandro Jodorowsy once said, “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” The Chilean-French filmmaker’s remark was resoundingly vindicated recently by Egypt’s liberal elites. They led massive crowds against President Mohammad Mursi and got the all-too-willing army to overthrow his year-old democratically elected government. The army-appointed interim president, Adly Mansour, has announced a process to overhaul the constitution (created by a democratically elected legislature) and to produce a pliant “elected” government. The Egyptians who agitated for the overthrow of the Mursi government should have realized by now that the army has taken them for a ride. It has used the anti-Mursi rallies as a cover for dumping the democratic process and reimposing its stranglehold on the government and the economy. So far the liberal elites are either cooperating with the army or looking the other way.

 

That is because most of today’s Egyptians, including liberals, were born during the decades the country languished under military dictatorships. They had never known democracy until the 2012 elections that ushered in the Mursi government, a Muslim Brotherhood leader. The Egyptian Brotherhood is the oldest and best-organized Islamist organization in the Middle East. Throughout its 85-year history the organization has been subjected to brutal repression by successive dictatorial regimes. Through it all, its membership and support grew steadily in Egyptian society.

 

Saadeddin Ibrahim, one of Egypt’s best known secularist intellectuals, lamented to me in Cairo in 1995 that “foolish mishandling” of the Brotherhood by dictators had made it popular. Otherwise, the movement would have disappeared long before.

 

During several reporting stints, I found that while persecution by dictators and the hostility of secularist groups had endeared the Brotherhood to Egypt’s devout Muslims, the organization’s strategy of moderation and its members’ adaptation to modernity were the main sources of its appeal. Muslim Brothers are among the best educated in Egypt. Mursi has a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Southern California. Issam al-Erian, who heads the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, is a physician.

 

To most Egyptian secularists, however, the Brotherhood has been anathema. Ever since Egypt slipped under the military dictatorship of Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1952, most of its upper-class secularists collaborated with successive military dictators and benefited from their patronage. If you tried to talk with them about their government, most would change the subject. During the Mubarak era, the only educated people who would talk freely about Egyptian politics were members and supporters of the Brotherhood and the youths, as well as progressives and liberals.

 

Many of the secularists were hurt professionally and financially when the Mubarak dictatorship was ousted by the 2011 revolution. Many of them have now jumped on the military bandwagon and are scrambling for their niche in the new political order.

 

It’s a familiar drama, played out in many Muslim (and other) postcolonial societies, among them Indonesia, Turkey, Algeria, Nigeria, Sudan, Mali, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In many of those countries the democratic process faced military intervention, in some places more than once, but eventually growing political consciousness succeeded in taming power-hungry generals.

 

I come from Sylhet in Bangladesh, which used to be Pakistan’s eastern province. In the summer of 1946 the leader of the Pakistan liberation movement, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, paid a brief visit there. The town was paralyzed by an unprecedented human avalanche. Many of the visitors had walked 20 or 30 miles, to have a glimpse of the leader of their struggle for independence from British colonial rule. Some of them, I was told later, shed tears of joy when Jinnah stepped up to the podium to give his speech in Urdu, which most of the Sylheti-speaking audience didn’t understand.

 

In a few years East Pakistanis became disillusioned with Pakistan’s central government in West Pakistan. The main grievance of East Pakistanis against the Pakistani central government was its failure to alleviate their grinding poverty. Their frustration deepened when Pakistani army generals, supported by a Western-oriented bureaucracy, established a decadelong dictatorship, interrupting the nascent democratic process. In 1971 East Pakistan broke away from Pakistan to become independent Bangladesh.

 

Two years later the founder of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujib a-Rahman, visited Sylhet, and was also greeted by huge crowds. But while Bangladeshis had taken 22 years to rise up against Pakistani rule, they staged the first rally in Dhaka, the capital, 23 days after Rahman became the country’s president. Public frustration with the regime reached its peak three years later, when Rahman was assassinated in a military coup.

 

Not a soul in all Bangladesh came out to the street, or held a meeting or issued a statement to condole the murder of the father of the nation. Bangladeshis’ disillusionment with the Mujib government was spawned mostly by a devastating famine, shortages of necessities and widespread government corruption, which followed the birth of Bangladesh. Three decades later democracy, though more chaotic than anywhere else in the region, has taken root in Bangladesh. Few Bangladeshis expect the return of an extended military dictatorship.

 

In Egypt, as we know by now, crippling power shortages, the near-collapse of the security apparatus and other administrative and economic problems were artificially created by Mubarak-era employees and anti-democratic activists. Their purpose was to discredit Mursi’s government. I believe that few Egyptians would enjoy very long the sight of corrupt, anti-democratic politicians, judges and pundits back in power or on the airwaves. Fewer still would like to see the army, which they struggled hard to dislodge from power, pulling the levers of government once again.

 

But a democratic process in Egypt would not have legitimacy without the participation of the country’s largest political organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Most Egyptians are devout. Despite their frustration with Mursi, the Brotherhood’s Muslim-oriented political agenda will continue to resonate among large numbers of them.

 

I don’t know how long it will take, but democracy will eventually prevail in Egypt, as it has in many other postcolonial countries.

 

Postrevolutionary Egyptian society is much too politicized and rights conscious to accept any system except full-fledged democracy. And when the democratic process resumes, the Muslim Brotherhood is likely to have a dominant role in it. The secularist-military victory over it would seem to be a pyrrhic one.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.