Welcome to you all to an Oxford event at the Middle East centre where we're hosting
two wonderful scholars from across the Atlantic on the theme of dictatorship.
Those of you who've been attending regularly will be familiar with the series that we've started this term on the basis of Allah as well in his book,
The Dictatorship Syndrome.
And I'd like to welcome at this point our guests from across the Atlantic, Danish Farooqi and Dalia Vernae as welcome to you both.
Just so that everyone can see you, although you have to unmount in order for people to go to see you, I think.
My name is Sam Arseny. I am a department lecturer at Oxford.
I am the department lecturer in contemporary seismic studies. And I it's it gives me great pleasure to welcome Dalia Fahmy and Danish Farooqi
to talk about a liberal liberals and the future of dictatorship in Egypt.
This, in a sense, serves as a counterpoint to the perspective presented by Allah as funny a couple of weeks ago,
based on his book, The Dictatorship Syndrome.
Both Danny Fahmy and Danish Farooqi are the authors of an edited volume with a title that is quite similar to the this week's presentation.
The title is Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism A Liberal Intelligentsia and the Future of Egyptian Democracy.
And in a sense, these two scholars have pointed out certain challenges that liberalism faces in Egypt in particular,
that renders it a an illiberal form of liberalism. So I want to briefly introduce our two speakers and then I'll quickly hand over to them.
They'll have a short period of about 10 minutes to give a presentation.
And I think they'll take a slightly different tack on their presentations, as we will see shortly.
And we welcome participants to ask questions immediately.
We will pick up on the question is, you know, potentially midstream.
For that, we have our colleague, Professor Walter Armbrust, who will be sort of waiting in the wings to read to us the questions that are
coming in that can then be addressed by Professor Dalia Fatemi and Danish Farooqi.
So let me very briefly introduce them both. And because we have sort of just one hour and we want to make this sort of short and sweet.
I'm going to give brief introductions, both of these scholars, a very accomplished.
And I could go on for a while.
But Danny Fahmy is associate professor of political science at Long Island University, where she teaches courses on U.S. foreign policy,
world politics, international relations, military and defence policy, and much else besides, much of it focussed on the Middle East.
And she is a senior fellow also at the Centre for Global Policy in Washington, DC.
As I've mentioned already, she is the co-editor of a volume entitled Egypt and the Contradictions of Liberalism.
And the other co-editor is with us, Danish Farooqi.
Dalia has written a number of books and other edited volumes.
She's sort of helped compile a number of academic journal articles.
But of course, both of these scholars are quite well known to the media circuit.
They very often contribute to media outlets, whether in the form of interviews or in the form of op ed pieces.
Danish Farooqi, for his part, is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre for the Study of Genocide and Human
Rights at Rutgers University and a doctoral candidate in history at Duke University.
A scholar of the Middle East and Islamic history with a particular emphasis on Islamic political thought.
He has spent several years in the Middle East as a researcher and a journalist, and as noted,
he is also the co-editor of the work whose title informs our own title for today, namely illiberal liberals and the future of dictatorship in Egypt.
Without further ado, I'd like to hand over to our speakers and I'd like to remind everyone that they are free to ask as many questions as they like.
Beginning immediately and Walter Armbrust will kindly curate them and pass them on to the speakers once they're finished.
So I think, Dalia, you are up first. If you'd like to go, please.
Well, thank you so much and good evening to all of you out.
Across the pond.
And good afternoon to those here in the States and thank you to the Oxford Middle East centre for hosting us in this important moment,
resee dictatorship and authoritarianism or authoritarian tendencies on the rise
throughout the world and for including us in this theme framed by Dr. Aslan,
his latest book, The Dictatorship Syndrome. And of course, thank you, Dr. Asmi.
Or moderating the session. So the events that led up to the January 25th revolution and its power as a transformative moment in
North Africa and move on demonstrated the strength that the strength of people from all walks of life,
Muslim and Coptic, liberal and conservative,
secular and Islamist, poor and wealthy, educated and illiterate, coming together calling for freedom, dignity,
good governance and democracy present in this transformative moment where both the masses and the intellectual, the popular elite.
But as the uncertainty of post revolution took place, this decidedly non-democratic forces began to further consolidate power.
And the elites or the intelligentsia, those that hold the most power independent of the state apparatus, grew increasingly silent.
This group's silence and by extension,
their complicity with what became a repressive military regime runs counter to what we know and democratic transition theory.
Which begs the question of why was the elite silent?
What caused them to turn on the population? They stood alongside Biden in Times Square.
Now, this notion of complicity I want to focus on because Dr. US wante also focuses on it.
And I want to beg the question of who's complicit here. So the impetus for us to put this book together came full circle after the aftermath
of the horrific massacre of protesters in Rabaa and not the squares in 2013,
which gave rise to a narrative of a Byford committed Egyptian society in which undesirables could be or needed to be outright eliminated
to cleanse Egyptian society leading to a Human Rights Watch has called the largest single day massacre of protesters in modern history.
Now the role of the intelligentsia in their silence and in some regards,
promoting this exclusionary narrative remains the key motivating factor for us behind this project.
Their complicity all gave rise to anti-democratic values,
undermining the democratic process they purport it to uphold and the dismantling of the very civil society which years of their work was based.
Well, Dennis is going to focus on the ideological foundation, but particularly individuals, on particular individuals.
I'm going to focus on the few institutional structural dimensions owing that philosophical foundations do give rise to these institutions.
Now, the book, because it's a it's a it's an edited volume, does go into the role of NGOs,
student movements, civil society, the media, education and other aspects.
But I'm going to focus on the parliament and perhaps in the Q&A, we can briefly talk about other institutions such as media and the judiciary.
Now, these are institutions that are meant to safeguard democracy and foster a liberal society and liberalism,
begging the question of do illiberal institutions foster a liberal society or vice versa?
And what is the connexion now? Dr. Swannee does touch on this.
I'll be coming at it in a very different way. Placing the onus of complicity on the population or people.
And I'm going to focus on an alternative causal frame, which I will discuss later.
So in looking at robust and strong political parties as being key tools for ensuring
state political development and granting a structure to political participation,
its organisation, its expansion. Political parties are meant to help ensure the overall stability of a liberal democratic process.
Regrettably, however, this is not the case in Egypt, where weak institutions have considerably hampered democratic consolidation.
In particular, the Egyptian Legislative Assembly.
That is the bulk of my work as the site of cultivation of laws regulating political party formation have
proven complicit in outright and feeling Egyptian political institutions rather than involving them,
rather than being an outlet for civilian. Joyce's political parties in Egypt remain instead deeply circumscribed and ultimately ineffectual.
Put another way, despite the key role of a multi-party system in the preservation of a liberal democratic political order,
the dysfunctional nature of party politics in Egypt has instead promoted an illiberal political order in stride and perpetuated it.
At the systemic level,
the structural illiberalism in Egyptian politics elucidates how the failure of political mobilisation in Egypt to make significant gains
in largely grounded in the systemic failure of party politics as a mouthpiece for the political aspiration of the Egyptian masses.
And unfortunately, not only does this continue today. It is worse than it was pre revolution.
Now, throughout modern history, Egypt has proven largely incapable of providing a meaningful outlet for political opposition.
Since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 and the free officers movement, the Egyptian state has ushered a secular as as a secular republic.
If the demands on a Republican government to wrest power in the government and through elected representatives,
the Egyptian republic from its inception gave rise to a series of structural
conditions that both undermine and suck circumscribe political contestation.
The first deficit of democracy or a democratic consolidation in Egypt speaks to an equally pressing phenomenon.
Democratic decay, hard won stability can be put in jeopardy by rapid social change, institutional rigidity and organisational complicity.
And when considering the owners constraints under which the opposition parties in Egypt operate,
working against the backdrop of the pendulum swing of democratic consolidation through formerly a wholly superficial elections and institutions,
that potential for democratic decay becomes very much apparent.
For these political institutions do not perform the same functions in an authoritarian context as they would under a democracy.
The primary aim of political institutions under authoritarian regimes is to ensure the state society relations can be controlled,
where demands can be revealed without appearing as acts of resistance, where issues can be hammered out without undue public scrutiny.
And while resulting agreements can be addressed, a legitimate, legitimate form publicised by such accordingly.
The function of such institutions under authoritarian regimes is not the cheque on authority of the executive, but rather to control society at large.
By circumscribing formal avenues of participation now post revolution,
there is this question of what is political pluralism and cannot function in Egypt now after the January 25th revolution.
Within a few days, we saw the flourishing of the beginning of political parties.
And it begs the question, why was this impossible under Mubarak and what has happened today?
So under the Mubarak regime, we saw that there was a law that prevented political party formation because of redundancy.
And so by design, political party formation leading to contestation and politics was by design eliminated.
And this begs the question, and we can talk about it more in the Q&A. Why?
When we think about opposition in Egypt or opposition parties in the Middle East, persay, are they Islamist in nature?
Post revolution, when the law was changed, we saw a flourishing of political parties within the first few days of the change of the law.
The first party to be registered was was the centre party. The loss of party.
Another newly formed Egyptian Democratic Social Party by founded by Dr. Aamer Hamza,
who is a contributor to our volume, who is an academic here in the States today.
Tom Foreman, formerly with the Carnegie Foundation or the Carnegie Centre,
forming a party comprised of hundreds of professionals and university professors.
A few days later, the secular West Party hosted a symposium for all Egyptian secular parties,
both old and new, to join the established the new established order.
Very few days after that, 73 members of Egypt's oldest leftist party, Atigun Ma,
walked out of party headquarters over contestation of what is their new party going to look like,
ultimately leading to deeper discussions on party formation.
But it wasn't just that moment of pluralism that existed within the Islamist network or the Islamist frame.
We saw a flourishing of political parties where the Muslim Brotherhood no longer, for example, had a monopoly on religion and politics.
The centre party was formed to other parties were formed.
And for the sake of time, I won't go into detail.
But what I want to focus on is that here we saw the flourishing of political party formations almost instantly after the revolution with
political platform is being established with beginnings of contestation of the coming parliamentary election right after the revolution.
And it begs the question of Dr. Aslan, his assumption of not just who is complicit, but who was pacifying this new order.
And so what happened? And for the sake of time, I'm skipping over and possibly in the Q&A we can talk about what happened under SCAF,
what happened during the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood,
the Muslim Brotherhood, or President Morsi's time in office and then the fall and how today we have a deeply entrenched military dictatorship,
but in diagnosing the syndrome. Dr. Oz, when he talks about a set of symptoms that seem to appear together and how it happened,
how they happened, and possibly now that we know what the symptoms are, we can offer a cure.
Assuming that and the assumption is that the dictator, as an individual who controls society,
is not just himself controlling society, but is controlling a complicit population that almost calls for this control.
And so society are both victims and facilitators of dictatorship.
And he captured this interestingly,
in this story at the outset of the text of the narrative between him and his father as their standing in the wake of President Nasser's death.
And he sees that the people are not accepting of the death. They're not accepting of the loss of the big man.
Now, we know that this idea of the big man permeates throughout Dr. US.
One is other works in The Yacoubian Building. There is a big man in the background.
In Chicago, there is a big man,
but it denies people the idea that maybe they're mourning the defeat of Pan Arabism or the humiliation of the 1967 defeat or the coming
uncertainty or the lack of clear path or a constitution that has not enshrined democratic institutions and the representation on the larger scale.
There's a saying in Egypt, and I'll say colloquially, the man who she could be that you should be.
If you don't have a big man, you purchase a big man because you need a big man.
And this is the kind of undercurrent of the theme in several of his works, but also here.
And so the question remains, can we look at a complicit population as both facilitators and victims of the syndrome?
Are there institutional factors that enshrine and ensure this?
For example, institutions that I've mentioned briefly, why are oppositions always framed in Islamist terms?
Are there institutional reasons? And the reason why a challenge is framings,
because asking the right questions or the wrong questions may lead us down the road of constructing
solutions that might seemingly be addressing what are symptoms or indicators of the syndrome.
He he's he's alluding to of dictatorship, but not of the disease of oppression and the lack of democracy.
So I'll I'll stop here because I've reached my time limit.
But hopefully this is the beginning of a conversation that we can have a healthy discussion and then the Q&A.
So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Dunia, that was, you know, giving you a very short period of time.
But that was a wonderful and insightful insight, insightful look into the institutional challenge,
the challenges on the historical challenges and in some respects, the sort of the cultural norms that had been instigated by certain historic.
Phenomena in a place like Egypt that allow for, in a sense, the festering of this dictatorial system where political institutions,
rather than being cheque some power and serving that power and being cheques on the populace.
Cheques on the popular women and the rest of it.
So know, thank you for, in a sense, that analytical insight into that in some respects as one these ideas,
but also some of the problems that potentially ought to be found.
And in a sense, I think Dennis Firkins recently in the past year or so, recent piece in foreign policy,
looking quite incisively or presenting something of a trenchant critique and critique of Sweeney's work with respect to contemporary Egypt.
And I think I expect that we'll get a taste of that in what follows.
And thank you for sort of starting to ask questions already.
People are already asking questions. Please note, you do have the option of anonymizing your question.
And so if you don't wish your name to be mentioned in the course of mentioning the question, please anonymize yourself.
Other ones will assume that it's okay to mention your name. But without further ado.
Please don't shoot me. The floor is yours. OK. Thank you very much.
First, thanks for the Oxford Middle East centre. Two professors, Verhagen and Aissami and Armbrust for extending this invitation.
And briefly, a special thanks to my collaborative partner, Professor Fathoming even several years after our book's completion.
Working hand-in-hand with you on this project remains one of the biggest honours of my professional journey to date.
So thank you very much. With that, I proceed.
So I suppose my own reading of the dictatorship syndrome was already signposted for lack of a better term,
not only because of the themes of our book more broadly,
but Asama, as you mention, but because of my own writing since then, drawing on our book's critique to more directly address Dr.
Swan, his political writings so that the doctor has already been my interlocutor on several occasions.
Having said that, for the purposes of this presentation,
I thought it best to rely as much as possible on the thematic agenda of the book under consideration and only augment when necessary.
To that end, I want to focus on what I considered the three most edifying chapters.
Book would seem to have the most global resonance in the phenomenon of dictatorship more broadly.
First, the chapter concerning conspiracy theory. As Dr Aswini puts it, quote, Without exception,
every dictator who has seised power in the modern era has ridden the crest of a conspiracy theory and quote as a basis both for
subverting a dictator's accountability for his misdeeds or crimes and as a basis for outright circumventing democratic institutions.
Conspiratorial thinking gives the atmosphere necessary to discard the rule of law, even if temporarily.
Indeed, Dr. Aswang, his writings here almost portend the rise of anti science conspiracy theories about
the covert Bentek pandemic being propagated by Donald Trump and his supporters.
The atmosphere of misinformation is especially germane to allowing the US president
to escape accountability for his mismanagement of the public health debacle.
Similarly, from Hosseiny,
Mubarak dismissing the entire protest movement as part of an international conspiracy to take down Egypt to his administration,
suggesting the same of the 2011 protests that ultimately took down his administration.
It's clear the conspiracy has been the bedrock of preserving Egypt's authoritarian atmosphere.
Now the next chapter under consideration concerns the spread of the fascist mindset.
Dovetailing with his insights on conspiracy theory here,
A speaks at length about the role of media in furthering the ambitions of the
dictatorship syndrome by forcibly branding the regime's critics as traitors to the state.
Relying on the example of the Nasser error, Egyptian liberal journalists sent those whom our book actually addresses at some length.
A Swannee aptly offers the cautionary tale that even otherwise respected journalistic
figures can easily be tamed by authoritarian leadership and ultimately produced propaganda.
In its service further, a co-opted media can and does serve as precisely the vehicle to disseminate conspiracy theories,
thus offering a broader atmosphere of disinformation in which the dictator himself becomes the sole and ultimate arbiter of truth.
These dual phenomena thus feature prominently in dictatorial regimes more broadly.
And putting this broader campaign of disinformation to greater scrutiny is the necessary prerequisite.
A swannee ends his book suggesting to prevent the dictatorship's syndrome more broadly,
that this is all admirable and offers lessons well beyond the Egyptian case and get a more careful reading of a swamis writings more broadly,
particularly as they pertain to the putative threat of political Islam.
Regrettably, reveal a series of double standards that render it exceedingly difficult to read.
The thesis of this book is altogether consistent. We see the seeds for his blind spots in his chapter on dictatorship and terrorism.
A chapter that at face value seems somewhat misplaced with the rest of the book drawing a parallel between religious conviction and dictatorship.
A Swannee claims both are united by an exclusive appeal to emotion rather than intellect.
And on that basis, both presuppose a singular monopoly on the truth.
From there, he attempts to offer a distinction between the politically neutral Muslim and the more insidious Islamist,
the latter of whom is the bedfellow of dictatorship par excellence.
Yet as he weaves his parallel aslant, he relies on defensive posturing not only of Islamists but of Islamic history more broadly.
That is so caricatured and alarmist that it almost becomes a lost on his reader that the author
only pages earlier cautioned excessively against the wilful adoption of conspiratorial thinking,
chastising Islamists for indoctrinating their followers with the falsified version of history.
Asani moves on to dismiss the totality of Muslim rulers throughout history as having been,
quote, simply tyrants who Papeete perpetrated injustice plundered and killed.
End quote. Relying on incidents from the lab at bested and Ottoman empires to make his case.
To be clear, there is no historian of those empires worth their salt.
Who would question the blood spilt by those empires or by Islamic civilisation more broadly?
Noris sexual licentiousness under the ambassador, for instance.
Much of a secret at this point. Yet Aswini offers these this alarmist reading of Islamic history,
in effect to draw stark juxtaposition between political Islamists on the one hand and fascist dictatorship on the other hand.
And in this context, a swamis broader writings about Islamists can be better understood as part of
an established pattern in which his paranoia about the threat of political
Islam makes him more than comfortable suspending his own judgement about the dictatorship syndrome and the tools it employs to further its agenda.
Conspiracy theory and media disinformation campaigns is thus no longer appear in Citius,
so long as they are directed against Islamists rather than dictators of a different persuasion.
Indeed, as my colleague Mohammed al Masri argues very convincingly,
the Egyptian media as an institution was quite unhinged in its reliance on conspiracy.
During Mohammed Morsi's presidency, for instance, covering a speech Morsi gave in which he addressed his audience with the salutation.
Yeah. Yeah. Assurity my people, my clan.
Media figures of the highest persuasion in Egypt unanimously moved to accuse the president of using an Islamist dog whistle,
in effect pledging his loyalty not to the people of Egypt, but only to his fellow Muslim brothers.
Despite any sober reading of the rest of that speech,
making painstakingly clear that Morsi was indeed referring to the Egyptian people more broadly and in his capacity as a political journalist.
Dr. Aswani himself has been no stranger to being a purveyor of conspiracy.
Here I'll refer to an article A had written following former President Morsi's mysterious death,
which I also addressed in that article in Foreign Policy, to which I'll leave my colleagues to direct you more specifically.
Granted, a Swannie does acknowledge the Sisi regime's culpability in the plane, medical neglect of an incarcerated inmate,
but then shifts gears to once again rely on hackneyed caricatures of the Brotherhood as a traitorous terrorist outfit,
implying that the blood spilt by the Brotherhood makes its share responsibility in the former president's demise.
In the process, a swannee wholly suspends his hostility to conspiracy,
claiming that Morsi was never a democratically elected president in the first place.
Relying on the dubious charge that all elections previously won by the Brotherhood were
a function of bribing poor voters with either cash or staples like oil and sugar,
a charge of Swannie qualifies.
With no evidence whatsoever as having been proven conclusively unsubstantiated innuendo of this sort then essentially means that Morsi.
The Brotherhood had themselves to blame for the former president's death and
incarceration in the same vein that the existential threat posed by the Brotherhood.
Dr. Swansea's physicians suggest necessitated Morsi's forcible removal by a military coup and the rise of the hitherto unimagined dictatorial regime.
Under Sisi and ultimately rendered the infamous massacre in Rabat actually a square, an unavoidable.
Correct.
To be clear, the purpose of this exercise is not to dismiss critique more broadly of the Brotherhood of political Islam or of Morsi's presidency.
Anyone who has read our book would immediately recognise that we are no less harsh in our critiques of
the Brotherhood than we are of the Egyptian liberal class to which the book is primarily directed.
But in a political moment in which a dictatorship is on the rise globally, believers of freedom,
democracy and the rule of law need every tool imaginable to properly push back against dictatorship and the mechanisms undergirding it.
Dr. Aswani, to that end, has done a great service in outlining some of those mechanism mechanisms and subjecting them to a very worthy critique.
But his own paranoid blindspots about political Islam blind spots that as our book assiduously documents,
are endemic to the project of Egyptian secular liberalism more broadly.
Ultimately render his prescriptions of limited staying power.
Standing up to dictatorship requires going beyond endlessly and impoverishing, critiquing its premises only when politically expedient or convenient.
Rather, defeating the dictatorship syndrome requires the intellectual and indeed moral consistency.
I hope the good doctor can take this into consideration moving forward.
And with that, I think my time is up. Lantier.
Thank you very much, Danish, for that very sort of thoughtful and sort of in many respects quite trenchant reflection on a lot less.
One is dictatorship syndrome, I think. I mean, in many respects, the challenge that arises from your presentations, both of you, is is the,
uh and it's articulated in the title of your book as well, a liberal and the title of this presentation, a liberal liberals, in a sense.
What does it mean to be a liberal if you are a liberal at the same time?
And I think this also ties in with the question that Walter will probably put to you from the audience.
And I am sure Walter also may have questions of his own, and I would welcome him to sort of put them to you.
But what does liberalism mean in a context like Egypt,
where in many respects it's it's used to limit the sort of the voice of democratic sort of forces within the society.
But at the same time, it is seen as legitimately doing that on the grounds that ultimately those who are not card-carrying
liberals in these societies pose a threat to wider society and are not truly democratic.
Yet at the same time, these figures sometimes appear to show that.
Their own commitments to democracy have certain limits as well.
And so this is this is a challenging sort of state of affairs in Egypt.
And perhaps with that, if I can take this has prerogative and and begin the Q&A.
I'll put that as a question to the two of you. And, you know, feel free to answer both of you or just one of you.
And then I'm sure there are plenty of questions that Walter is ready to put to you.
So who would like to take this, please, to me?
Well, I'll take a really brief alive strath of how we think about liberalism as, you know, the basic political doctrine.
That's about the protecting and enhancing of the freedom of the individual.
And that is the central problem and role of politics and the role of government in ensuring and
devising a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty,
but prevents those from governing from abusing power. And so very loosely determined.
That's how we define liberalism. And again, because there's so many contributors who talk about it differently.
You know, the mechanisms of governance, the mechanisms of articulation could be different, referring to different theorists.
However, the cornerstone here is the protecting and enhancing freedom and individual liberty,
both for institutions and looking at the kind of democratic preconditions literature that requires
the liberal intelligentsia to be the safeguard of this transition or the safeguard of this movement.
And so the question for us continues to be their silence, their complicity.
But even in the kind of recalling of the past to look for solutions towards the future, they are not just limited.
They're actually missing the bulk of the levels of structural, political and ideological injustice that facilitate the moment we're in today.
Thank you very much. I'm going to now hand over to Walter, if that's okay.
And feel free to put forth the questions.
OK. I'll start by. Well. I confess, I had had a similar question to the one that Osama has already put in,
which was the very first question that we got, which was what do you mean by liberalism?
But in my case, I'm just wondering why you're talking about a liberal liberalism rather than just talking
about the failure of liberalism or the absence of it or the dysfunctionality of it.
I'll throw that out to you, but I have not. I would like to get to questions that have been put to us by members in the audience.
I'll let you answer. You've already addressed that to some extent.
But let me let me throw out one of the other questions we got from the audience, which is from Danny Rhen.
And the question is specifically addressed to Dalia.
And it is can you speak a bit about the relationship between political parties and civil society groups,
the degree of elite capture of NGOs or activist groups that takes place,
and whether you feel any segment of Egyptian civil society can operate functionally and independently of ties and loyalties to political elites.
So these are two questions, actually, and they're very important. And I'll start with the second one.
And Yeo's have been historically extremely important as the kind of bull works or mechanism through which civil society is not just operating,
but continuing to foster those democratic trends and democratic norms or attempting to.
What we've seen in the past few years is not just an attack on, set on and Gio's,
but the closure of many importance NGOs, the one of the primary cases that a lot of activists have been brought under,
including people in the United States and throughout the academic west,
have been the capture under NGO laws that these were ways with which there was infiltration to defame the government.
But today, if you look at the role of NGOs, they've been extremely limited.
There have been the closure of NGOs and many civil society organisations.
For example, the shut down of the UN, the centre, an NGO that offers support to survivors of torture and violence.
The particular Kozar and attacks on feminist NGOs and those for women's rights.
The criminal investigation of the case one seven three against human rights defenders and NGO is the investigation that continues since 2013.
Anyone who receives funding from those who wish to harm Egyptian national security
under the Article 78 of the penal code carries a 25 year prison sentence.
The freezing of many of the assets of NGOs continues until today.
This bleeds into, I think, the bigger question of the of the terrorism laws that exist in Egypt today.
Terrorism laws that are defined with a very large swath of their definition enacted in 2015,
continuing until today, renewed earlier this year, and actually even more stringent term.
And they're so broadly defined that if you look at any cases of activists today,
any cases against Indio's members of the media, there's always a terrorism charge.
In my latest article that looks at pre-trial detention as a method of suspending activists in
this kind of pre-trial purgatory where you're no longer held for 45 days but up to two years,
renewable tacking on more charges all under the terrorism clause.
Anyone who's seen as speaking outside of the state narrative threatening the state narrative comes under this deep terrorism law.
And so the closure of ndu yos begs the question of why are these institutions that formerly
work outside of the structure of government but have a historically important role to play?
Why have they become seen as a primary threat to which not only their clothes assets seised,
but many of their leaders have been arrested under under the terrorism law?
The first question was about, I think if I recall correctly, political party formation.
And I think it might be referring to what I was hoping someone would ask you about it.
Why is it in Egypt when we think of political opposition?
We think about Islamist parties. We think about primarily the Muslim Brotherhood.
If you look at that law that I was mentioning in my earlier presentation, the law was designed to actually undermine,
undercut and prevent the establishment of secular and leftist parties,
which were important in the 1952 revolution in the writing of the first constitution that's no longer there.
And so secular leftist parties have always been seen as a threat, an underlying threat of the Egyptian regime.
And so the establishment of secular and leftist parties has always been very difficult.
It's difficult to establish and register a party, and the language of the political law was redundancy.
They're all doing the same thing with similar political platforms.
And so it's almost institutionally by design, the elimination of political pluralism within the secular and leftist camp.
And so when you get to the Islamist camp, especially under so that when they were actually allowed to come into the first political opening.
By extension, their political activity over time since the 19th.
Well, historically, but really since the 1970s, flourishing up and in the night in the two thousand in the 1990s,
but really in the 2000s established this as not just a movement, but a political party,
even though they were still running as independents,
but still with a structure and a framework allowed to work within the constraints that Mubarak had for them save the 2005 to 2007 political opening.
And so post revolution. It's natural to think that well.
When the authoritarian big man is gone. Be aware of the new Islamist incursion that's coming on the doorstep.
And so if you recall. The public addresses that were played in Liberation Square or Tahrir Square.
There was this constant from Mubarak. I know only I can protect you from what I know is coming behind us, which is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Right. Again, the big men protecting from the impending threat. Now, this terrorism narrative now is everywhere.
A rise of populism, simple solutions to very big problems. It's just the one people need to eliminate.
We see them here in United States. President Trump just tweeted about the big Muslim threat again last night in
the largest effort to kind of swing votes and in these three primary states.
But but here, it's almost structurally by design,
the elimination of real political pluralism and the relegating that the only viable option is an Islamist option and one version of it.
Creates a public sentiment that political pluralism is maybe not what we need.
And this has become entrenched in post revolution Egypt, especially when political, social and economic conditions have even deteriorated more.
And so the safeguards of the transition to a consolidated democracy, intelligentsia, institutions,
civil society, their erosion is almost by design the guarantee for an entrenched in a long gaited dictatorship.
And unfortunately, today it is worse in Egypt than ever has been historically.
I have a quick follow up to that. About Angelos. And either of you, perhaps both of you could respond to this, which is.
Aren't our NGOs taking up the space that political parties should occupy and unwittingly acting as.
An impediment to the formation of effective political parties that could that could actually function within a liberal sit,
liberal system needs political parties.
And instead, you have everybody who's interested in politics, whether you call them liberals or something else.
Agreeing to the terms of its kind of NGO formation that set by the state.
Maybe. Absolutely. And this the kind of coopting of NGO formation exists not just in Egypt, it exists in the Palestinian territories,
it exists in Jordan, just in the Gulf countries where NGOs are becoming the vehicle for change.
And so the suspicion of NGOs, especially those who accept foreign training, foreign funding,
you know, then colours the entire swath as as non-democratic and not the interests of the state.
But in the case of Egypt, the NGO that continuously attacked the most are the feminist NGO Gio's, those that are trying to uphold women's rights.
And so there is one of my first publications was on the the the interesting marriage between feminists,
NGOs and the Muslim Brotherhood in nineteen ninety nine to push for this is under Mubarak, the two thousand,
the change and two thousand of the personal status laws where for the first time in two in the year 2000 and this the change in the process,
Ansel's women were allowed for the first time to apply for a no fault divorce, were allowed to apply for not just child custody, but maintenance.
Right. And then the evidence they had to produce was actually very basic elements of a love letter.
It was enough to produce for them to produce.
And so the marriage between the feminists who were using the language of these are deeply enshrined religious laws that we have been protected from.
And so they should be pushed for in governance.
And the Muslim Brotherhood being the ones with which they were working with, you know, opened up that doorway of NGOs are functioning.
Yes. And the kind of pushing for political agendas that are meant to protect the
people and give them that kind of liberal values that we're being prevented.
But the interesting thing at that moment was the marriage between the feminists and Yeo's and the
Muslim Brotherhood or members of the Muslim Brotherhood were that independents beg the question of,
well, the threat is even getting deeper and the threat is even getting louder.
And so here the elimination of both becomes extremely important.
The only thing I'll add to that is that our call,
our distinguished colleague and Leisz had written at length about the role of NGOs in Egyptian society.
And just to kind of wedbush to the broader conversation about the dictatorships and drum,
regrettably, conspiracy is very much used in service of discrediting NGOs,
particularly, as Dalia had mentioned, NGOs that accept foreign funding of any kind as being de facto enemies of the state.
And in Egypt, their ability to operate freely has never been more constrained for precisely that reason.
Okay, I'm going to give you another question from the audience. This one is from Nesmith Sakib.
And the question is, when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, there was an argument in many Western policymaking circles that the Muslim
Brotherhood is illiberal and as the West should not only care about democracy,
but also care about liberal values, it should pressure the Muslim Brotherhood to liberalise more when it has been to that.
What has happened to that argument now since Egypt is now being dominated by a government that is neither democratic nor liberal?
I think either. If you can take that. Sure. So let's unpack the question first.
So here the Muslim Brotherhood coming into power was.
Was was through those through elections,
right through several rounds of elections and through a year previous where people lined up at the polls seven times for a constitutional referendum.
And so you saw that the democratic process, just as I kind of was speaking to earlier, the political pluralism,
people establishing political parties, that these were deeply entrenched and so people coming into the polls and voting for it for.
For the Brotherhood. Isn't as a by-product of the democratic process.
The Brotherhood coming into office. And again, word we're talking about 10 months, really 10 months of the Morsi administration.
There is the kind of run up to the election. I started to do the kind of flagging of whoa!
Something doesn't feel right here for it for a swath of the population.
Historically, the Brotherhood never contested more than 20 to 30 percent of seats available.
Right. It was never about getting powers, about getting a voice. And they upped it to 40 percent and then 50 percent.
This is running for parliament before president in that parliament was ultimately cancelled and then running, contesting all hundred seats.
And in my writings, I talk about that kind of the fear rising of what happened to trying to become a party of influence rather than a party in power.
And so the logic behind that, they argue, is that not enough people willing to run for office.
And so to safeguard democracy, they start increasing right now.
Technically, there's nothing wrong with that. But you can start to see how public perception response to that as the usurpation of power.
That parliament, of course, was cancelled. The next election is for for president, the presidential elections and many candidates are running.
You know, we all know the history. And ultimately, in the second round, President Morsi is elected again, elected democratically.
Now, what does the Brotherhood do in that 10 month time period?
We can't we can't remove the and dodginess factors in a country that's just gone through evolution and
the exoticness factors that needed the failure of an Islamist government or an Islamist president.
And so here the Brotherhood. Yes. Did they make mistakes? Absolutely right.
Not being able to win hearts and minds in the streets to a certain extent.
President Morsi speaking on his own behalf, while some of the biggest, I think,
ideological challenges he had in the street were from members of the upper echelon of the Brotherhood,
speaking in language that created a level of uncertainty in the population.
The constitutional referendum, there's a huge division on how that was read, what it was intended to.
So, yes, absolutely. The Brotherhood and I and I've written about their constitution and even questions on the role of women's rights.
But all of that does not. Mean that there should not be continuation of the democratic process to vote folks out of office.
Right. And so we know that in constitution and democratic consolidation, democracies are considered consolidated when there's a turnover rule.
Right. Books have been voted into office, out of office and half of office voted into office.
And then within 10 months, being removed in a military coup because of the existential fear of what our Islamist going to do to us.
And the fear narrative, as Denish alluded to, was coming from many, many factors,
building on the level of conspiracy theory that they're going to sell the pyramids and the Sphinx and, you know, closed cinemas.
And in my writing on their behaviour, for example, in Parliament pre revolution, they never took up these issues.
It was bread and butter issues.
So what is the role of, you know, the adherence to real structural liberalism, of using institutions of governance to protect civil society?
And this really deep movements, both, both, both internally and externally, to ensure the failure of this government to almost welcome their removal.
Ultimately leading to the enshrining of what we have today, which is a military dictatorship.
Dennis, I know you have more to say on this. I see you nodding. I know.
I think that was actually quite robust. So I'm kind of at loss for words, OK?
But I actually want to come back to the last thing that Dalia just said, which was a question that we got from Eugene Rogan, of all people.
And I confess, it was a question that had occurred to me as well.
And I to more or less paraphrase Eugene's question, which is, shouldn't we be talking more about the military?
I mean, his question was in the form of what if?
A lot of sweating and focussing on the figure of the dictators overlooking the underlying problem of the deep state in San Diego,
particularly in the military. And, you know, it occurs to me that perhaps all talk of a liberal order in a state with a military this powerful,
which has been sustained by its foreign relations,
particularly with the United States and through, you know,
a series of kind of emergencies brought about by wars that entrenched military power more over the decades.
Why are we talking about the military? Why?
Well, why are we talking about the failure of a liberal order in a society that in a state that is, in fact, dominated by the military?
OK, to that,
and I think that Dr. Aswini at least alludes to the role of the military when he talks about his childhood memories in the context of the 1967 war.
He was having conversations with an Italian neighbour of his who for whom he was translating the media correspondences,
and then that Italian neighbour, after the latest correspondent suggested that Egypt had downed some 20 Israeli planes or something like that.
And the Italian neighbour said, my boy, your government is lying to you.
It's not. I lived through that the the Second World War.
It's not possible for that make plans to be down to today.
So I think he does allude to the power and the strength of the military in falsifying narratives.
This goes into his broader conversations about conspiracy theories.
So the deep state is on his mind.
But once again, I don't think that it's really he doesn't view the deep state of the military as the penultimate threat.
He views Islamists excessively, take up that role.
And I think that's really what leads to the good doctor to kind of shift gears and his attention and focus.
That's a wonderful question. When we look at the role of military today, we used to say that the Egyptian military controls 20 percent of the economy.
Today, it's it's upwards of 80 percent of the economy. If we look at the role of military in politics, the military is politics today.
There's there's there's really no getting around the military. I remember just as the revolution and, you know,
the Friday where president President Mubarak stepped down and there was announcement that it's over and everyone is celebrating.
And I remember looking around saying, OK, well, this was a soft coup.
Remember, the military stepped aside and let this happen. Right. There are soldiers and tanks in the streets.
And it was, you know, one hand.
And I remember saying this is a soft coup because in politics there are winners and losers in an order for the people to win.
We had to recognise that, well, the military had to let go of a level of constraint and control on society, the economy and politics.
Now,
the military started to see Mubarak during the revolution and pre revolution as a threat because they were about to go into that kind of headed tear,
hereditary rule of his son. And so they stepped by and in some of their own kind of public statements that were made of,
you know, telling young people, you didn't do this revolution.
We actually let it happen because we needed the removal of Mubarak very quickly thereafter.
And in 2013, it became very apparent that President Morsi was a threat to the military, needed to be removed.
And unfortunately, today, the military of today is very different than the military of Mubarak.
President Sisi has purged the top three layers of the military out of fear of his own, his own future.
And so there is going to be a coming moment, I believe,
where he will be a threat to the power of the military because of really poor economic and political positions.
Today, Egypt is strategically weak. One of the weakest countries in the Middle East on several fronts of its border.
And so, however, he has very efficiently purged the military Randi.
Alternate voices.
The presidential election that occurred a little over a year ago or a year and a half ago, much of the viable candidates were ex military officers.
And so that signal that there is an internal rift. And so you're absolutely right.
We can't be talking about illiberalism in an Egyptian society without talking about
the deep entrenchment of the military and politics and the economy and civil society.
It stems from the idea that every family has a military officer.
These are sons of the nation. They have our best interests.
And the begs goes back to that question of complicity, of not being able to see the military as a threat to the political order.
But absolutely, the military in power is a threat to liberal ideals.
I could bring out one more question from an audience member,
but actually I wanted to ask the Sammeth, perhaps he has a really good chance to ask the question.
Do you have a question, Osama? I would feel guilty taking the opportunity away from some excellent questions that come through the audience.
OK. So I have a question for Monica Marks, who is one of our own graduates with the detail.
And her question is, to what extent do you feel that fears regarding what the Muslim Brotherhood would
do to women's rights and the potential for Sisi to protect women and feminists
against the spectre of Muslim Brotherhood repression proved to be a pivotal
factor in consolidating so-called liberal support for Sisi has ruled Egypt.
It wasn't addressed to anybody in particular. So either one of you or both of you could respond.
I can take this, although I feel I've been talking too much Spanish. If you want to feel free to go ahead.
You know, that was one of the narratives that was promoted. Right.
If if the Morsi administration continues, you know, women will be moving outside of the public sphere to be forced to cover.
And again, this this hysteria, this is covered in our in our book under Mohammed Mastery's chapter.
And I remember having conversations with folks and saying, you know, what exactly is it that you're afraid of?
Like, what is the steep fear? And it's that I won't be able to go to a resort and wear a bathing suit.
And I said, what indicators do you have that this will be eliminated under under this presidency?
And they're not there. They're absent. The conversation on that used to occur in the year.
I think it was 1995 of should Egypt be part of the Miss World pageant?
Right. These kind of symbolic curtailing of women's visibility in the public were not happening in the 2000s.
And there weren't conversations on this in terms of the Constitution written under or
beginning to write big written under under under President Morsi's administration.
Constitution was very similar to the Constitution before it.
One of the primary differences, it actually removed Sharia as the law of the land.
Right. So if you think about the Mubarak constitution included the language of Sharia as
the law of the land was under the Mubarak constitution that personal status laws,
limited women's women's rights, women's inheritance, child custody laws.
And so here you had a constitution that was was going to be more progressive in that regard.
But in my my opinion, not progressive enough. But the current constitution is worse.
And so the idea that Islamists are out to get women's rights and women's representation and women's visibility
doesn't technically have evidence when it comes to the last at least 15 years of Muslim Brotherhood attempt,
attempted legislation and parliament. But the narrative of hysteria around what they would do to society is still very deep.
Right. Again, from selling the pyramids to the wife of President Morsi, a woman who not just veiled or Humar longer a veil.
How could she be the first lady of our country? It's so regressive, right.
That kind of symbolic language still exists in Egypt.
And there there, again,
are very long institutional reasons and historical reasons why controlling the body politic of politics on the bodies of women's continues.
The authoritarian nature of this is very gendered.
Mubarak would not have gone into the streets and said, those women into your square, those are the ones fighting for your rights.
Those of the daughters of the nations, the ones sleeping in the streets. We have to remember there were virginity tests on these protesters.
Right. Some of the first images we saw of protests were women coming face to face with the security apparatus.
And what happened to them? They were stripped of their clothing. Right.
It's a very gendered nature to the to the revolution, to the state's response to the revolution.
And so all of this has to be taken together. And we can't take one aspect of this area on what these so-called Islamists would
do to the state without looking at Egypt's long history of authoritarianism,
being in student enshrined on the bodies of women. Thank you very much earlier.
And I'm sorry to say that we've really run out of time at this point.
And I feel that you've not had the opportunity to say very much to I as the chair.
I would like to give you maybe a minute you'd like to say anything but otherwise and at this point going to wrap up.
So would you like to add anything or a reflection, Pops? I don't really have any specific concluding remarks as such.
I mean, I know you and I are really speaking in one voice here at all.
I don't really feel like there's anything more that I need to add at this point.
That's that's perfectly OK. And of course, in some respects, you did speak in one voice because you co-wrote and co edited a work.
And that's the work we're talking about in some respect. So I'd like to thank everyone who's attended.
I do apologise that we didn't get to all the questions, but these are sort of short and sweet sessions, hopefully.
And I'd like to thank Walter for really sort of managing questions very well and giving plenty of sort of opportunity to those who had ask questions.
But finally, I'd really like to thank both Duniya and Dunnage for really giving us some food
for thought with respect to thinking about the place of liberalism in Egypt and.
The way in which ideology is very often used to subvert an ideology that
ostensibly is about promoting democracy is very often used to subvert democracy,
unfortunately, in these very unusual contexts.
And to echo what is sort of remarked, in a sense, it's not liberal liberalism, but it's kind of failed liberalism.
But we can also sort of reflect on critiques of liberalism that you that you sort of treat in your introduction to the work
that showed that liberalism is such a vast tradition and quite a capacious tradition that it has traditions of colonialism.
And, you know, recognising that there are millions of people is that place is a part is about the liberal tradition as well.
So it's it's a complex history.
And I hope that those of you who are attending and there's I certainly learnt more about this tradition as it applies to the Egyptian context.
And with that, I'd like to thank you all again.
I can make one one and I just I wanted to say I very much hope the doctor is finding himself either is in attendance or that
he ultimately does have the opportunity to watch this free presentation and would be extremely honoured to hear his thoughts.
I will try to convey that to to Dr. Wendy, who I do not know personally.
But, you know, I will do what I can to do that. But thank you again.
And I look forward to sort of what we can at least and to look forward to welcoming you again next week to another session.
It's actually a one that I will again be running. So literally I will be looking forward to welcoming you on the Gulf specifically.
And we're having to, you know, an amazing scholar and an amazing journalist.
The Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, Ben Hubbard, alongside Mordovia Rashid,
who is an extremely prolific author on Saudi Arabia, on the Middle East, more generally.
So please do join us next week. And until then, have a good weekend.
Take care. Bye bye. Thank you all.
Thank you very much for having us. Thank you.