“They will never have dominion over the people of Gaza. We will not abandon Gaza! We will not abandon Gaza! ” – President Mohammad Morsi of Egypt, in 2012, during the Israeli bombing of Gaza
If we want to condemn this world, in which the innocent are massacred before our eyes, we are obliged to at least try and imagine a better one. It need not be perfect, just good enough, at least, to preclude the slaughter and barbarity we have all been forced to watch for the last two years.
This exercise in alternative history, like any other, requires a POD —- “point of departure” — where the imagined reality diverges from our own. The nearest convincing POD I can imagine is back in 2013, at the beginning of Obama’s second term when his administration very clearly greenlit a coup, removing Mohamad Morsi – the only elected president in Egypt’s 7000 year history, from power.
Obama released a statement in the days immediately following the coup saying the administration was “deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy (sic) and suspend the Egyptian constitution” and calling for the transfer of “full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible”. The key word here is “a”, as in “a civilian government”, not “the civilian government”. The other key word is coup which is absent from the statement, and subsequent White House communications, to get around the so called “Leahy Law”, which calls for a full suspension of all aid to militaries involved in coups against democratically elected governments.
Instead there was, starting in October, a partial suspension of some cash payments (about $260 million) and “major weapons” systems like fighter jets. Six months later, in April of 2014, when the entire Islamic opposition, more or less, was in jail, along with many others, when hundreds of protesters, likely more than a thousand, had been killed in massacres, and no progress had been made towards any kind of civilian leadership, they announced the shipment of 10 apache helicopters, because “terrorism”. Then in 2015, once all hope was clearly dead, they resumed full service. At no stage was intelligence cooperation, the flow of parts for existing vehicles, or the crucial officer training program interrupted. So aid was suspended, except for anything they actually needed.
That’s what really happened. But, what if, we might dare to wonder, what if the wind had blown a different way, or with different vigour, that evening in Washington, causing the scent of a tomcat to waft through leaves in the branches of a particular tree, causing a flock of birds to take flight, causing their wings to catch the afternoon sunlight in the sky outside the White House window, filling Obama’s mighty heart with just a little more hope and love, enough for him to decide “hey you know what, let’s not murder all those people, let’s give this ‘Arab democracy’ thing a hecking try!”.
In this timeline Morsi was able to enact his mandate and govern, to hold the parliamentary elections that were scheduled for later that year (Morsi had wanted to hold them in April—two months before the coup—but the old regime’s courts blocked that). In this timeline, where the Muslim Brotherhood- the most important national liberation movement in the Arab World, had been able to enact their mandate and complete the transition to democracy, neither the October 7 attacks, or the subsequent genocide would have been allowed to occur because a democratic Egypt would not have permitted either to occur.
For an idea of what might have happened, we can look at the eight days, not two years, of the 2012 conflict in Gaza. The Times of Israel published a piece at the time which included the following passage:
Egypt’s first freely elected president, Morsi also handled the Gaza conflict in a way starkly contrasting with his predecessor, longtime authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled nearly two years ago.
An ally of Israel and deeply opposed to Hamas, Mubarak’s regime helped Israel blockade Gaza after Hamas seized the territory in 2007. When Israel and Hamas last went to war in 2008, Mubarak was accused by critics of secretly supporting Israel’s ground offensive.
During that offensive, far bloodier than the past week’s, Mubarak kept the sole border passenger crossing between Egypt and Gaza mostly shut, preventing some of the more seriously wounded Palestinians from receiving treatment in Egyptian hospitals. Mubarak’s regime was also wary of any deals that would legitimize Hamas’ rule in Gaza. Mubarak feared that a strong Hamas would embolden Islamists at home, particularly his nemesis, the Brotherhood.
Morsi has not completely thrown open the crossing as Hamas would like. But during the past week, Egypt let in wounded Palestinians and bolstered Hamas with waves of delegations entering Gaza to show their support — from Egyptian activists to the foreign ministers of Turkey, Qatar, Algeria, Sudan and others.
Morsi also dispatched his prime minister to Gaza soon after hostilities began on a heavily symbolic visit. A photograph of a tearful Hesham Kandil kissing the lifeless body of a Palestinian child was splashed across the front page of every Cairo newspaper.
It’s entirely possible that this is what doomed him, and Egyptian democracy, that at this stage – a less than six months into his four year term – the US foreign policy and intelligence establishment decided that neither could be tolerated.
But not all the blame lies in the imperial metropole.
To understand the urban, western-facing, elite of the Arab world, it is necessary to understand the example of Kemalism. After leading resistance to the allied occupation, Kemal Ataturk aggressively moved to Westernise and Europeanise Turkey, drawing on the enlightenment-born nationalist ideologies that had been mobilised against the Ottomans themselves by Serbs and others, and against backwards religious authorities, all across Europe. These changes included switching from an Arabic script for writing Turkish to a Latin one.
Secularism in the Arab world, following this example, is a primarily right wing nationalist phenomenon. It’s guys with very-clean-shaven chins and Sadam-moustaches, selling books near Tahrir square, including Arabic copies of Mein Kampf on prominent display.
This reform effort was, as many have pointed out, superficial in its focus, but profound in its brutality. There were deadly serious fights (literally, people were executed) over stuff like what kinds of hats people could wear.
The most extreme version of this Western-aping-fascism might be the explicitly Nazi-inspired Phalange, Lebanese Maronites who famously committed, with Israeli assistance, the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. But the same basic political gestures were present in the Nasser-through-Mubarak era “National Democratic Party” of Egypt.
It is from this secular stream that produced the so-called “Hezb al Qanaba” – the Party of the Couch, who stayed home during the “18 days”, of the revolution that toppled Mubarak. A similar cohort provided Ahmed Shafiq, undeniably a “felool” – meaning a Mubarak era regime stooge, or “remnant”, who was Morsi’s opponent in the final round of the election, with the majority of his 12.3 million votes (vs Morsi’s 13.2 million).
It is this secular stream which participated in the Anti-Morsi, pro-coup, protests of 2013, culminating in the June 30 protests, led by the group Tamarod, meaning “Rebel”, which was later revealed to be funded by the United Arab Emirates, and acting in coordination with the brutally repressive Egyptian Intelligence Services.
It is this secular stream that still controlled the military, and perhaps more crucially, the judiciary, after the Brotherhood and their Islamist allies won the parliamentary and presidential election. The liberal and anti-authoritarian seculars – Like Alaa Abdel Fattah, who was recently pardoned and released from prison after 6 years – are a minority within this minority, and a tiny one. The smart ones among them, at least, know this perfectly well, and knew back then, too.
I remember distinctly my conversation with the Egypt editor of a trendy left wing online magazine, who was visibly shocked, insulted even, that I cared at all about the Carter Institute’s “tick of approval” for Morsi’s election victory. He preferred the vaguer term a “renegotiation of the social contract” to anything so crass and obvious and Western as free and fair elections.
As Norman Finkelstein said closer to the time it was a question of whether or not you respected 1) the principles of democracy, and 2) the votes of “poor Muslim people”. Many Egyptian seculars did not – including many of those to whom Western commentators looked for guidance.
Consider the following tweet from Egyptian novelist of global acclaim Alaa Al-Aswany.
Secular, Westernising, actors in Egyptian politics were scared not that the Brotherhood would cancel elections, but that they would hold them. They feared the electoral strength of the brotherhood and other Islamists, who had long standing charitable wings, active in villages across the country, where the secular presence was often at or near zero. I say near zero because Bassem Youssef does have an Egyptian audience, as well as a Western one, might have been on the TV, even, briefly, after the coup.
It’s worth taking a look at the first show he did following the Rabaa Massacre. It aired in January of 2014. At about 30:00 he can be seen performing a musical number (to the tune of “Old Macdonald Had a Farm”) during which – in a perfect Orwellian inversion – he suggests any member of the brotherhood is a “traitor” and a coward, and that the movement was funded by “the Americans”.
Elsewhere in the song he sings “Sisi fucked them, the Brotherhood”, (the term is literally “split”, but colloquially used in a similar way to “fucked” – though the subtitles here translate it as “raped”). Later in the song he returns to the hilarious theme of forced sodomy, a verse later he says “they [the brotherhood] started whining” while thrusting his hips in a clearly sexual motion.
One of the other words that features in the song is “legitimacy”, which was a key term Morsi returned to in his speeches in the days before the coup, reminding people, reminding history, that he was the one with a mandate from the people. The seculars were sick of hearing it (go ahead and ask them). Fuck your legitimacy, they said.
In fairness it should be noted that after the song is finished, he acts out a scene where one of the backup singers uses the word “coup” and he and the rest of the performers rush to shush him. This implies some development in his position between this broadcast and his tweets at the time of the coup, like this one, now deleted, which explicitly said it was “#not_a_coup” and blamed the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership for the violence committed by the military against their supporters:
Still undeleted is the following tweet where he points out the inconsistency of the US media, who were fine with ignoring Hamas’s election win, but seem to be taking the Muslim Brotherhood’s win seriously.
His problem in the tweet above is not that the US actively invalidated Hamas’s 2005 election win, but that they are failing to do so to the Muslim Brotherhood with sufficient enthusiasm.
At no stage has he or any of his fellow travellers seriously grappled with their failures, their betrayals, in the intervening years. Not even in 2019, when, after years in prison without proper medical treatment, Morsi died, probably in court during his sham trial. We don’t know precisely: He collapsed in the soundproof glass cage which holds defendants, but the trial went on around him after that for some time, on the basis that he was pretending. He was eventually taken to a hospital and declared dead. As far as I am aware, this triggered no expressions of regret or remorse. The silence was just as deafening a few months later when Morsi’s son, who had prominently laid the blame for Morsi’s death at the feet of the regime died, died apparently of a heart attack, at the age of 25 (his lawyers would later claim he had been poisoned).
Coincidentally, Youssef will appear today (7 October 2025), TV, for the first time in 11 years. Perhaps he will surprise us. I am not holding my breath.
We need to revisit this because until we understand what happened in Egypt, we cannot understand what is happening today in the Arab world, or beyond, and especially not the countries on its borders: Libya, Sudan, and, of course, Palestine.
The founding of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hassan Al Banna should be considered a reaction against this secularising trend, what the Muslim Brotherhood’s English language website calls “Western-inspired and secularly-minded,” nationalism. It’s an attempt to forge a more culturally indigenous Islamic nationalism. Many similar responses were articulated from within the Islamic scholarly tradition, such as the Islamic Philosopher and Poet, Mohammad “Allama” (the learned) Iqbal, who pointed out that it was the brain where science and learning took place, not the hat.
The goal of these Islamic nationalists was to acquire Western science and engineering, and even some constitutional arrangements – source of their power – while retaining and protecting their indigenous Islamic culture. This mixed approach is very much in line with Egyptian popular opinion. As I noted during Morsi’s brief tenure, polling showed support levels for “sharia” or islamic law, and democracy, simultaneously, at about 80%. That means a minimum of 60% saying yes to both – yes to democracy, and yes to Sharia. That ambiguous, arguably confused, best-of-both-worlds-centre ( we might call them “normal Muslims”, as they are neither fanatically conservative or reformist) is the Brotherhood’s constituency. Their biggest electoral challengers were not seculars, but those further to the religious right. Hizb al Nour, (The party of the Light) the salafi fundamentalist party, were the second biggest group in Egypt’s parliament. Not the secular forces (which were, themselves, we must remember, further divided into authoritarian and liberal seculars, with the authoritarians being the stronger faction).
The Brotherhood was not the Islamic extreme, but the Egyptian version of a “sensible centre”. They similarly represent a moderate, centrist view on the use of violence. They supported and participated in violence, including killing senior Egyptian collaborators with the occupiers – it during the British occupation of Egypt, and sent fighters to Palestine to oppose the Zionists in 1948, but foreswore and ceased all violence following the British withdrawal in 1954. But not all Islamists agreed.
Over the course of the 50s and early 60s a dissenting current emerged, those, like Sayyid Qutb, who felt that the Brotherhood were too willing to compromise, and too quick to withdraw from violent struggle. These thinkers can be seen as reacting against the Brotherhood in much the same way as the Brotherhood has reacted against the secular nationalists, turning even more sharply away from assimilation into a Western world and legal order. This debate, within political islam, between the non-violent path of democratic participation, and the jihadi path of violence, has raged ever since. In other parts of the Arab world, such as Palestine and Syria, these two strains have often coexisted within a single organisation – such as the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. But in Egypt, the largest and most sophisticated intellectual ecosystem in the Arab world, these strains find distinct organisational expression. One strain runs clearly from Qutb, down through the Egyptian cleric and Al-Qaeda mastermind, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and September 11. The other runs from Al Banna (and before him, Mohammad Abdo) down to Morsi and his victory in the elections.
At no point in the history of this intra-Islamic debate did the non-violent path look stronger than in the immediate aftermath of Morsi’s historic election victory, when Morsi saw his approval rating skyrocket to a historic high of 79%, and the idea that political Islam and democracy were compatible seemed manifestly true. Over the months of obstructionism, crisis, and constant anti-Morsi coverage by establishment media, this approval rating dropped as low as 32% by the one year mark- so an exaggerated version of the standard honeymoon-followed-by-disillusionment dynamic many elected leaders go through.
Then the coup happened – and the pathway for peaceful, democratic, progress in Egypt, and in Palestine, was cut off. A democratic Egypt could have provided, and was seen by many as providing, a central pole, holding up the roof of the tent, creating space for other democratic polities to emerge, and a central, stabilising figure for this new order to coalesce around. With that pathway closed, the desperate young men of the Arab world were left with an increasingly stark choice between capitulation and violence.
Two years ago, Hamas fighters chose not to capitulate. In the two years since then, Israel has collectively punished the people of Gaza for this choice, while advancing its long term goals of genocide and expansion. And, with the brotherhood all dead or in jail, rather than governing Egypt as they should be, there has been nobody to stop the slaughter.
See the research for this story:
