Shafik and the Sufis

Interesting points from Daniel about Sufi support for Shafik:

“It is perhaps a minor point, but I would like to make the point that it is not only the Copts who support Shafik (as the vote totals alone would prove). Although the Sufi leaders refrained from endorsing a specific candidate, it is my understanding that Shafik has strong support from many Sufis, particularly those who are from the al-Azamiyya tariqa (many of whom are (or were) members of the Egyptian Liberation Party). While the proposition ‘All or most Copts support Shafik’ seems to be true, the converse proposition ‘All those who support Shafik are Copts’ is quite clearly false, no?

In a way, this makes sense — the Sufis have similar interests with the Copts, in that they want a civil society which supports equal rights for all and, as many of the Sufi leaders have said, their dervishes should not be supporting someone who is an Islamic extremist who has, in the past, expressed hostility toward the Sufis (as the Brotherhood in fact have). Al-Azamiyya tariqa, in particular, has a history in Egypt since the beginning of supporting Egyptian nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism of an Islamic variety, but with civil protections for minorities. They are understandably wary of a Brotherhood government. While the Brotherhood government would, perhaps, provide civil protections for non-Islamic minorities such as the Coptic Christians, they would most decidedly not provide protections for Islamic minorities such as the Sufis, since they regard the Sufi dervishes as heretics.

I’m not trying to build a case for supporting Shafik. He may well be the lesser of two evils, however, from a ‘law and order’ perspective. All I’m saying is that, if I’m a Sufi dervish, I’m going to be supporting Shafik at this point, because the Brotherhood, who now control the Parliament, need to be checked, otherwise they may in fact outlaw, or persecute, the Sufi tariqas in Egypt, and that would be a disaster for anyone concerned to cultivate a ‘moderate Islam.’

If there is going to be a moderate political Islam in Egypt, the Sufis have to be a part of that, and the Brotherhood will never tolerate their participation.”

First, I never said that all Shafik supporters are Copts. I said only that in my circles, all of the strong Shafik supporters I know are Copts. A number of these people are working class and did not benefit at all from the old regime, and are moved primarily by genuine fear of what an all-Brotherhood government might mean for them (and as I have said, those fears seem perfectly legitimate to me). The Copts are a small minority, and obviously aren’t going to win the election singlehandedly for anyone.

Nonetheless, Daniel is right to point out that there is a longstanding distrust between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Sufis, who are present in Egypt in considerable numbers. And if I were an Egyptian Sufi, I too would be strongly tempted to vote for Shafik, again out of sheer visceral distrust of the alternative.

I still puzzle over how I would vote, if I had a vote, and am still inclined to think that I would cast a blank ballot if I bothered to go at all.

It really is an unfortunate electoral situation in the runoff for any non-Islamist, pro-Revolution voter. “The worst-case scenario,” some have said. But then you have people who do think one of the two is far worse than the other, and who that worst candidate might be varies from voter to voter, even among ardent pro-Revolution people.

I struggle to come up with a reasonable analogy for an American equivalent of this choice, because the stakes are so different. But let’s say that in the U.S. you had to choose between a more extreme Pat Robertson announcing that religious law would be imposed in the U.S. if he won, and a more extreme Donald Rumsfeld claiming that the War on Terror required a domestic military crackdown against all protests in American cities. Which would you choose in that case? You might well stay home.

a more optimistic view from a Revolutionary

I just heard a more optimistic view of the Egyptian runoff on the BBC, HERE, (starting at the 36:48 mark) from Khaled Fahmy, the Chair of our Department of History, whose views on Egypt are always considerably interesting.

Fahmy, who is a Tahrir protestor to the core and hasn’t an Islamist bone in his body, nonetheless calls Mohamed Morsi an “infinitely better” choice than Ahmed Shafik, not only due to the latter’s service as Mubarak’s final Prime Minister, but also due to some of the alarming language (“fascist,” says Fahmy rightly) used by Shafik during his campaign.

Fahmy acknowledges that many people plan to boycott the runoff, but his positive take on the situation is that civil liberties are unlikely to wither away under a Brotherhood government, and that the Islamists in Egypt have been oppressed for decades and “this is their moment” and also the right moment to work out the role of Islam in Egyptian political life. He also makes the interesting case that it’s actually better for the Brotherhood to have both the parliament and the Presidency, thereby eliminating any possible excuse as Egypt judges whether or not they are able to get the job of governing done.

Whether he’s right or not, I don’t know. But it’s nice to hear some optimistic words about the situation.

In my circles of contacts, it remains the case that the pro-Shafik people are exclusively Coptic Christians. And again, I don’t blame the Copts one bit for not wanting an all-Islamist government, and for preferring the fascist they know to the possibly more dangerous one they don’t know.

another reason for possible optimism

But here’s perhaps the real reason for optimism when reading that Times article… Look at all the normal Egyptian voters who are going on the record about their political views, giving their names, ages, and occupations to a foreign newspaper. I don’t recall that happening often, or ever, a couple of years ago. People are worried about crime and the economy and politics, sure. But I do think the free speech/free press climate has improved drastically since the revolution.

There was always a mild but palpable degree of fear in the past in Egypt. But since February 2011, I’ve been hearing a lot more people just popping off about whatever they think.

returning to the center

If not that I were still basically depressed about the election results, THIS PIECE in the NY Times would be pretty funny.

There’s a famous mainstream maxim in American politics that candidates should move towards the extremes in the primaries and then rapidly back to the center for the general election. That already seems to be happening in almost comical fashion in Egypt. Consider this:

“At a news conference in Cairo on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Shafik, who had in the past compared Egypt’s youthful revolutionaries to a disrespectful child, now praised the ‘martyrs’ of the uprising and promised to return the fruits of the ‘glorious revolution’ to the youth.”

Yes, Ahmed Shafik’s commitment to the fruits of the glorious revolution and its martyrs can hardly be doubted, can it? He simply happened to be the Prime Minister for Mubarak at the height of Mubarak’s violence against the glorious revolutionaries. Other than that, I’m sure we can take his words at face value.

But perhaps it will work to everyone’s benefit. It is often forgotten that whatever policies people mouth during election campaigns, personal ambition often trumps everything else, and there’s always a slight chance that a “President Shafik” would be forced to suck up to revolutionaries in policy terms even in ways that would infuriate his pro-military electoral base. Or maybe not. But we have to have something to hope for right now, and I may as well grasp at straws.

But here’s the real point, given what will probably be a very close runoff:

“He urged people to vote in the June runoff, and spoke kindly about several of his competitors, including Hamdeen Sabahi, the founder of a Nasserist party whose populist campaign drew millions of voters, giving him a surprising third-place finish in the unofficial vote tallies.”

Sabbahi may be the kingmaker! The Brotherhood was publicly flirting with making him Vice President, and now he is praised by Shafik. The mere existence of an electoral runoff system may in fact turn the runoff’s two rather extreme competitors into tolerable centrists.

Or again, maybe I’m just grasping at straws and the whole thing is either going down Drain A or the Drain B. But why burst into tears on the telephone? May as well hope for a comical reversal thanks to the rules of the game.

Egypt vote totals spreadsheet

If for some reason you’re a real Egyptian Presidential election junkie and want to see how the vote totals varied by governorate, go to THIS SPREADHSEET. (Hat tip to my AUC Colleague Dr. Mona Amer in Psychology.)

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem on Tristan Garcia

The young French-Tunisian philosopher, novelist, and actor has written what looks like a remarkable 54-page open letter to the even younger Tristan Garcia on his book Forme et objet. (Hat tip, Alex Galloway.)

It’s been a busy day for me and so I’ve only had a chance to skim it so far, but the upshot is that the author thinks the current period in philosophy is the most interesting since 1965-70.

I was of course there to watch when speculative realism drew a lot of attention, but if anything, Garcia’s book seems to be stirring up even more high-profile interest.

Here are some things to really like about Garcia: he’s put his cards on the table by risking a full-blown system of philosophy very early in his career; he writes wonderfully; he reads omnivorously, including in the analytic philosophy tradition; he’s remarkably prolific and simply goes right to the point as quickly as he can rather than pondering over things for years, as many of us are otherwise tempted to do (I always assumed that writing a big systematic book was something to aim at past age 50, but Garcia just goes and does it, and with a great deal of success).

Anyway, as far as I can determine, Belhaj Kacem’s piece does not seem to be online anywhere, but the details are as follows:

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, “Lettre à Tristan Garcia,” La revue littéraire, 52, pp.111-165.

That will help you get it through interlibrary loan if you’re interested.

One of the reasons Garcia’s book is a potential game-changer is because he puts objects at the forefront at a moment when that seemed unlikely to happen in post-Badiouian French thought.

As you might guess, I’m quite happy about that. Garcia does it rather differently from what you’ve seen from American OOO so far (among other things, his referent is Meinong rather than Husserl and Heidegger as you’ll get from my version).

Garcia, who seems to have almost limitless ammunition at his disposal for his intellectual work, has already written a 3-page summary of his similarities and differences vis-à-vis my position that is better than anything I can come up with on the fly in a blog post. The major differences? I find him a bit too committed to flat ontology, which for me is a temporary starting point rather than something needs to be built into the foundation of an ontology. As a result, his “things” seem to me more featureless than necessary (he does this because he needs the category of the “n’importe quoi” to induce total initial flatness, and anything with specific qualities of any kind cannot be a “no matter what it is” in this sense). And in turn, since he identifies the specific qualities of objects (which, as opposed to Garcia’s “things,” do have specific qualities) with their relations of including or being included by other objects, he ends up with an ontology that is too relational. That is to say, insofar as he defines objects as the difference between their component parts and the effects they have on other things, the autonomy of the object is eroded in both directions. Change the constitutive components of a chair or change the chair’s position in the room, and in either case the chair is not the same chair.

But these are simply the sorts of debates one expects in philosophy, and the debates evolve over time into more refined form. There is plenty of room for many plants in the greenhouse, and Garcia is one of the most promising plants.

It’ll take a little while for the whole of Forme et objet to appear in English, but maybe we ought to start insisting that some of his lectures and essays head rapidly in our native language.

Sabbahi seeks suspension of election

I spoke too soon when I said earlier today that at least no one was questioning the fairness of the election. Hamdeen Sabbahi is seeking to overturn the election. And while voting irregularities will always be hard to prove and always risk sounding like sour grapes, there is this perhaps more serious legal issue:

“Parliament had passed a political exclusion law disqualifying Hosni Mubarak’s prime ministers from running for high office, but the elections commission declined to enforce the rule, instead sending it to the Supreme Constitutional Court.”

day of dejection for Egypt’s Revolutionaries

“I’m dejected, I want to leave the country,” Amer El-Wakil, senior coordinator of the Egyptian Revolutionary Alliance, told Ahram’s Arabic-language portal in a phone interview before bursting into tears.

Other than sheer laments, the talk among the Revolutionaries seems to be that it was foolish for both Sabbahi and Aboul Fotouh to run, thereby splitting the anti-Islamist/anti-Mubarak vote and allowing an Islamist and a Mubarakite to advance to the runoff. (There may be a little bit of “Monday morning quarterbacking” here, however, since no one was expecting Sabbahi to do this well at all, while Aboul Fotouh looked like a rainbow coalition juggernaut up until the eve of the election. Also, I’m afraid I’m not too crazy about Sabbahi, because I think he panders too much to the uglier side of the anti-Western strain in Arab culture.)

I must say, I’m feeling a bit dejected as well.

election hangover

There’s nothing to do now but hope that Egypt is lurching forward along the correct path, though I am disappointed that the winner will either be “Islam is the answer” or “let’s crush all dissent with military force.”

The bright side is, I’m not hearing anyone say this was an unfair election. And after years of cynically and even comically rigged elections under Mubarak, that at least is a step forward.

candid quote of the day

What I’m reading is that Sabbahi is actually in first place in Cairo and Giza, but not by enough to get into the top two for the runoff. Estimated final figures look like they’ll end up with Morsi at 5.5 million, Shafiq at 5.4 million, and Sabbahi at around 4.8 million (assuming the leaked figures from judicial election observers are accurate for Cairo and Giza).

Then there is this:

“18:25 Ahmed Khairy, the official spokesman of the liberal Free Egyptians Party, described the expected two-horse race between Mohamed Mursi and Ahmed Shafiq for Egypt’s presidential seat as ‘the worst-case scenario.’

Khairy branded the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mursi as an ‘Islamic fascist’ and former prime minister Shafiq as a ‘military fascist.'”