I’ve received a number of questions about Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Here’s one that arrived today:
“I subscribe to your RSS feed and happen to find your analysis interesting. However, I am curious how you can so confidently apply your methodology to vastly different cultures and peoples?
I live in Israel, and I happen to find your analysis of Egypt comforting, but my understanding of Arab and Muslim culture leads me to different conclusions. …
Anyway, we’ll see. Egypt is a good case. If you’re right, you will prove MANY people wrong who think that the Arab idea of democracy is to vote one time for an Islamic state. So far, that has been the case every time a predominantly Muslim state has had a free election.”
That’s an interesting way of looking at it, although perhaps Iraq can be considered an exception these days. Also, non-Arab Muslim states such as Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia appear to be exceptions, at least so far.
However, it’s not entirely clear that Egypt is headed for a democracy. The army has just dissolved the parliament, suspended the constitution, and promised elections in six months, though there’s no way to predict whether the elections will happen. And a massacre scenario is still a possibility.
What I’ve said is that there are very significant generational reasons why there won’t be an Islamic state like Iran, and that it’s very unlikely that Egypt will abrogate its peace treaty with Israel. News events in the last few days have supported those predictions so far.
I need to write something that’s going to generate hate mail, but it’s a point I need to make, so I ask those of you who insist on writing to me to at least limit yourselves to just 1-2 epithets per person. Sunday is the 66th anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden, according to the AFP, and some people consider that to be an act of genocide. Also, a web site reader has called my attention to the 1946 Zionist bombing of the King David Hotel, which some people claim is an act of terrorism.
So the point I need to make is that, while I have absolutely no love for the Muslim Brotherhood, they have renounced their past violence like others have. However, that’s not enough. What’s most important is the generational point: With the vast majority of the population of Egypt under age 30, most Egyptians, including Egyptians that support the Brotherhood, have never known a violent Brotherhood.
It’s a basic principle of Generational Dynamics that even in a dictatorship, major policies are determined by masses of people, entire generations of people, and not by politicians. The generational trends in Egypt are clearly away from an Islamic state. Even if the Brotherhood gained power, and some of the old geezers in the top level of the Brotherhood wanted to relive their glory days of fighting the Jews, the vast majority of Brotherhood supporters would oppose terrorism or abrogating the treaty.
Finally, the other reasons I’ve mentioned before are that there’s no jihadist constituency in Egypt, there’s no ethnic division that would affect the government, there’s no fault line between the monarchy and the clergy, as there is in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and there’s no popular charismatic leader like Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
These are very powerful generational reasons for the conclusions I’ve reached, as I’ve been describing in this series of reports.
Quite honesty, my expectation increasingly is that questions like parliamentary elections in Egypt will be determined by events outside of Egypt, because of the increasing instability of the entire region, exacerbated by surging global food prices.
I’ve written in the last couple of days about the instability of Saudi Arabia and about Egyptian police clashes with Bedouins in northern Sinai. In addition, the news today is that there are Sunni-Shia clashes in Bahrain, and that the entire Palestinian cabinet plans to resign on Monday.
As I’ve written many times, the Mideast is headed for a new war, refighting the 1948 war between Arabs and Jews. This will be one component of the “Clash of Civilizations” world war, pitting the “axis” of China, Pakistan and the Sunni nations against the “allies” of US, India, Russia and Iran, Israel, among others. The current instability in the Mideast is very worrisome in view of that prediction.
The REALLY INTERESTING question, which I haven’t yet attempted to address, is the following: When forced to choose one side or the other, will the Egyptians side with the “axis” or the “allies”?
On the one hand, Egypt fought against the Israelis in three wars, making it more likely that they will again.
On the other hand, the generational reasons described above make it more likely that Egypt will side with Israel. In fact, I’ve seen little mutual xenophobia between Israelis and Egyptians, while I’ve seen lots of mutual xenophobia between Israelis and Palestinians. That gives a clue as to how things will line up.
On balance, I’m somewhat surprised to find myself leaning towards the second scenario. The generational trends are just too powerful. We’ll see.