IN an interesting reversal, the liberals and secularists of post-‘Arab Spring’ Egypt seem to be veering towards supporting the continued oversight of the army on the country’s affairs.

The situation, though causing consternation on the face of it, is perfectly simple. If elections are held in September as planned, or even a year later, there is a good likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood may come to power. At stake is the future constitution of Egypt: the secularists and the Islamists have, obviously, differing expectations.

Egypt is currently governed by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces which is talking about a transition to democracy (with special consideration for the military, its interests and institutions).

In the referendum held on March 19, just over 77 per cent of the voters approved a package of constitutional reforms that included the holding of parliamentary elections and the election of 100 members of parliament that would form a constituent assembly mandated to formulate the country’s new constitution within six months. Another referendum is to decide whether that constitution will be approved or rejected.

All this is very right and proper, and functioning exactly as it should under the ideals dictated by the theory of democracy.

Here’s the rub, though: the March ‘yes’ vote was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood and the majority of other Egyptian Islamists; most secularists, it seems, including the majority of leftists and liberals were the ones to vote ‘no’ in that referendum.

According to news reports by various organisations, they want army rule to continue for long enough to allow their political wings to regroup. Currently, they stand fragmented, cut off from Egyptian society at large and even irrelevant, according to some.

Their reservations about the Muslim Brotherhood are not difficult to understand, and indeed may even hold parallels for some of us in Pakistan. After decades of political marginalisation since the early ’50s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser spearheaded a coup to overthrow the government of King Farouk, political parties and activities have been banned in Egypt. The coup was in fact supported by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Had elections been held in 1952 as scheduled it was feared that the secular-leaning Mustafa al-Nahas, the head of the secular-liberal Wafd Party, would have won operative majority. The Wafd Party was at that time considered the most popular political party in Egypt. As the BBC’s Middle East analyst Omar Ashour observed in an article last week, the Muslim Brotherhood sided with the army at that time for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.

“The Brotherhood’s leaders thought that this would give them an advantage in a political sphere free of strong actors. That, of course, was an enormous miscalculation,” he writes. “By 1954, Nasser and his clique dominated the army and had ousted pro-democracy officers, marginalised the liberals and then heavily suppressed his former allies, the Muslim Brotherhood. The brutal crackdown significantly diminished the local networks of the Brotherhood until the mid-1970s. But it never destroyed them. [… ]

“Very limited political space was granted to Islamists and liberals alike by successive Egyptian presidents.

“But the Brotherhood countered this by becoming active in universities and syndicates throughout Egypt, recruiting young people, building coalitions and, eventually, abandoning and de-legitimising political violence. Alongside this, the organisation provided a wide variety of social services.

“Their success is down to organisational hard work and impressive dedication. They are in many ways a textbook example of how to survive and prosper in highly unfavourable political conditions.”

And so, we have a situation where people inclined towards liberalism — who otherwise would have been considered the defenders of democracy — apparently have reservations about the holding of fair elections.

With their organisational infrastructure in disarray after decades of being marginalised, as dinosaurs lacking factors that Islamist groups have on their side, do they fear that the majority of the electorate — 55 million, of whom at least 34 per cent are illiterate — might say ‘yes’ to a referendum on an Islamist-leaning constitution? It would appear so.

The parallel to Pakistan is rather obvious, although of course the analogy does not fit exactly. The people likely reading this text — English-speaking, therefore likely to be of certain middle- and upper-class backgrounds, with exposure to the idea of secularism as delineated from ir-religiousness — would have cause to shiver.

Was it not the Jamaatud Dawa, the palatable face of the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba, that led a number of efforts of reconstruction after the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and other humanitarian efforts too? Is there not a long-standing argument that parents send their children to madressahs not because of ideological affiliations but because of the poverty of the state educational system, the prospect of some literacy, food and the distant dream of a future? Was the Taliban takeover of Swat not initially supported by the region’s general population, because the Taliban offered in part, a speedy justice system that the area glaringly lacked?

Meanwhile, so near across the border, we see that the US — after having waged war against the Taliban for a decade — is making an effort to bring the latter to the negotiating table.

The question, then, is that when does a terrorist/militant force become a legitimate, whether right-wing or left-wing, political force? There is the case of the Sinn Fein, after all.

The logical answer to that would be that any ideological group is a legitimate political force as long as it operates in the political arena and according to the rules of politics. And these rules require that the group bring voters on its side through debate etc, not through violent or coercive means. Politics the world over is a dirty game, but nowhere is it acceptable to argue from a point of vantage behind the barrel of a gun. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Sinn Fein, a host of others, gave up their guns to become political actors, regardless of whether they were radical or not. The Taliban, however, have consistently refused to turn take that route. Perhaps we should be thankful that they are not asking for themselves to be voted into power.

As long as any group is defined as militant, at least one can take refuge in the excuse that their will was forced upon society, rather than voted in.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com