Morsi's unsuccessful Islamist audition

The Egyptian army now controls the Arab world's most populous country, for the 60^th year of the 61 that have passed since that same army sent King Farouk packing to the gambling tables of the Côte d'Azur. At the time of the king's disembarkation in 1952, Egypt had a higher standard of living than war-ravaged South Korea. (Today, South Korea has five times the standard of living of Egypt — about $30,000 per capita annual income compared to about $6,000). It always has been clear that the Egyptian generals had no idea how to generate economic growth or create economic institutions that would favour such growth.

The military in Egypt (as in China, Iran, and various other nations), controls large chunks of industry, and operates as a highly privileged state within a state. The popularity of the Egyptian army rests largely on the fact that it is practically the only organization in the country with any plausible level of competence, and it still carries the laurels for having regained the Suez Canal for Egypt and for restoring a modicum of national military self-respect opposite Israel, after it cracked the Bar Lev Line in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. (The fact that the intervention of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was necessary to prevent the complete encirclement and capture of the southern Egyptian army by Ariel Sharon is generally overlooked, as heroes have been fairly scarce in the two millennia of post-Cleopatran Egyptian history.)

Had the recently departed Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, had the slightest aptitude for producing economic growth, he might have sustained a level of popularity adequate to allow his unilateral tweaking of the Constitution (giving himself greater powers, and tainting the functioning of the state with a greater overlay of imposed Islamist orthodoxy). Instead, Morsi besmirched the reputation of the Muslim Brotherhood (from whose elite membership he originates) by his creeping jurisdictional usurpations, and by the accelerating collapse of the Egyptian economy. A broad assortment of leading Egyptians — including luminaries of the Muslim religious establishment, the leader of Egypt's much-persecuted minority Coptic Christians, and former International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed Al-Baradei (who proved contemptibly inadequate at the IAEA, but in the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is pharaoh) — appeared on television with the army chief of staff this week to announce Morsi's unacceptability.

This is unmistakable evidence that the popular support and mystique that the Brotherhood had amassed over 85 years — as the custodian of the Islamic faith, the source of the most effective social services, and in many ways, the ark of long-dormant Egyptian nationalism, downtrodden as it had been by centuries of Roman, Turkish and British overlordship — has been significantly dissipated. The hour of ascendancy of the Brotherhood, which, with its radical Salafist allies, seemed to have the support of about two thirds of Egyptians in 2012, passed quickly. The country's clerical and intellectual Muslim leadership has flaked off the Brotherhood and now has repositioned itself with the forces of secularism, religious moderation, and a constructive attitude to the West.

Morsi was an ineffectual, mousey and irritating little man who did not rouse a great popular following, and indeed was bereft of any of the attributes required of a successful rabble-rouser capable of incrementally asserting absolute rule. That playbook, written by Hitler and others, is based on racking up successes and fillips to national ambition, and Morsi never got to page one.

There was something deservedly and terminally absurd in the way Morsi continued to harp on the legitimacy of his election, even as the army announced that the president, elected a year ago, was now subject to an absolute travel ban. Morsi was indeed a legitimate president, but not a legitimate dictator; and his moral authority evaporated in lock-step with the crumbling of the economy. In his year in office, there was no growth, no job creation, no investment, no progress, no hope, and only his incremental nibbling toward more autocratic authority.

© 2024 Conrad Black