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Short Cuts
Adam Shatz
On 4 July, the day after the army overthrew Mohamed Morsi and suspended
the constitution, I got an email from a friend in Cairo. A photograph of
the 30 June demonstrations in Tahrir Square was emblazoned with the
words: ‘This is not a coup’. He didn’t say what else it might be, but
soon enough others did. A second revolution, a ‘people’s coup’, a
‘re-colution’: terms coined to describe how the events felt to
them, or perhaps to bridge the discomfiting gap between experience and
reality. It’s not the first time a coup in Egypt has been called
something else: Nasser and the Free Officers who overthrew King Farouk
in 1952 also called their coup a revolution. What’s different today is
that the most ferocious critics of coup-talk are people like my friend,
veterans of the 2011 uprising against Mubarak.
Their
insistence is understandable: having brought down another hated
president, they’re proud of what they’ve achieved and resent the
suggestion that they’ve been manipulated – especially when it comes from
Westerners. The youth movement Tamarrod collected 22 million signatures
for a petition urging Morsi to resign, and organised the biggest
demonstrations in Egypt’s history. You can argue that Morsi’s removal
set an alarming precedent, but not that it was unpopular. You can’t even
cast it as an elite secular conspiracy against the pious Islamic
masses: General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, commander of the Supreme Council
of the Armed Forces, is a devout Muslim (his wife wears a niqab) and has
the support of the Salafi al-Nour party. The Salafis are to the right
of the Muslim Brotherhood, but they didn’t appreciate the Brothers’
authoritarian style, and they knew an opportunity when they saw one.
Within days of Morsi’s removal they flexed their muscles by blocking
Mohamed ElBaradei’s appointment as interim prime minister; ElBaradei,
who used to say he would never collaborate with the Scaf, accepted the
vice presidency as a consolation prize. For now, an obscure jurist
called Adli Mansour is acting president, and the economist Hazem
el-Beblawi is prime minister. But why bother to remember the names? The
‘re-colution’ will eat its children, just as the revolution did.
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