Egypt, July 30: Hundreds of thousands of ultra-religious Islamists packed this capital’s central Tahrir Square in an unprecedented show of support for the creation of an Islamic republic, rather than the planned unity demonstration in collaboration with secularists. In doing so, they drove a stake through the heart of a united revolutionary movement that had brought together Egyptian Islamists and secularists, Muslims and Christians, and shared the goal of democratic elections and the punishment of the corrupt regime of Hosni Mubarak.
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Arab world uprisings “The Islamists showed their true colours today,” said Hisham Kassem, the former editor of the independent al-Masry al-Youm newspaper and one-time vice-president of the liberal el-Ghad Party. “From this day on, everyone will know these guys can’t tolerate others’ views. They’ve been pretending they can work with others,” he said.
“This is a lot like Iran,” said Saeed Rahnema, a left-wing activist in Tehran in the late 1970s and now professor of political science at York University in Toronto. “And it’s only going to get worse. Once the Islamists start in like this, they’re never going to let up.”
As strong as the Islamist forces get in Egypt, however, it is unlikely the country will go the way of Iran, at least not in the foreseeable future, Prof. Rahnema said. For one thing, Egypt’s Islamists have no central leadership the way Iran’s Islamists had in Ayatollah Khomeini, the exiled Iranian cleric whose return ultimately led to the Shah of Iran’s ouster.
For another, said Prof. Rahnema, “the army in Egypt is a separate entity. It’s vital that it stay that way, so the system won’t totally collapse” as it did in Iran. That’s when the Islamists came to the fore.
But the prospect of something like Iran was very much on the minds of remnants of the secular youth movement that led Egypt’s popular uprising in the spring, who were in Tahrir Square Friday. It was the largest protest in Egypt since the February departure of former president Mubarak and, overwhelmed by the Islamists’ numbers and by the Islamists’ stark religious agenda, the secularists walked out of the square and complained to the press that they had been deceived and would have no part of further joint protests with the Islamist groups.
Bulos Oweideh, a Coptic priest who sits on a joint revolutionary council that included both Islamists and secularists, shared the outrage. The Islamist hijacking of the demonstration, he said, was “contrary to what we had agreed.”
“It was all supposed to be about Egypt, not about sharia or Islam,” he told reporters.
Banners put in place in the wee hours of Friday morning proclaimed, “Islamic law is above the constitution,” while chants used throughout the day in the square insisted “the people want to implement sharia” just as they once had chanted, back in February, “the people want the regime to go.”
“We can live in an Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood in government,” said Father Bulos, “but not if they govern by sharia. This is not the Egypt we want.”
Safwat Hegazi, spokesman for the fundamentalist Salafists, dismissed the complaints of the secularists. “There was no agreement,” he said, referring to the concord said to have been reached between the two sides to avoid confrontation.
“If they [the secularists] don’t want an Islamic state, they’re free to go.”
He challenged them: “If they’re so sure they represent the people, let them see if they can fill a square with three- or four-million people. Show us,” he said on the Al Jazeera (Egypt) television network.
“We are the people,” he said defiantly. “This is an Islamic country.”
–Agencies