Egypt After the Coup

Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for TIME
Anti-Mubarak protesters near Tahrir Square during the 2011 protests that toppled the dictator.

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Look at the world from the perspective of someone who embraces Islamic politics. In 1991, Islamists won in national elections in Algeria that were free and fair, with dozens of parties contesting and an open and lively campaign. The Algerian military annulled the results and unleashed a campaign of arrests and violence against the party that won. In 1995, Islamists won the elections in Turkey, only to have the Turkish military force the party out of power two years later in what is often referred to as a "soft coup." In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian elections--triggering a boycott of the newly elected government by the U.S. and most of its allies.

In Egypt, the Brotherhood won at the polls three times. It won in the parliamentary elections, in the presidential election and then in its referendum for the new constitution, which passed with 64% of the vote. Last year a judge dissolved the lower house of parliament, and now the constitution has been suspended and the President is in jail. "And the message will resonate throughout the Muslim world loud and clear: democracy is not for Muslims," wrote Essam el Haddad, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, on his Facebook page.

In 1997, I wrote an essay titled "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy." In it I described the troubling phenomenon of elected governments systematically abusing individual rights and depriving people of liberty. I pointed out that in the West over the past half-century, democracy and liberty had gone together, but in many developing countries we were seeing them split apart. Elections were producing illiberal regimes.

Egypt under Morsi was a textbook illiberal democracy. But the Egyptian military is not a force for liberty or the rule of law. This is the regime that ran Egypt for six decades, abusing human rights, crushing economic freedom, banning free media and jailing political opponents. The choice in Egypt is not between bad democrats and a Singapore-style efficient and open autocracy. It is between illiberal generals and illiberal politicians. The tragedy of the Arab world is that it is trapped between these two forces, neither of which is fertile ground for the flourishing of liberal democracy.

Egypt does have a second chance. The military has done some things right since the coup, quickly scheduling elections and the drafting of a new constitution. But the central challenge it faces is to bring the forces of political Islam back into the political process. Remember that they still represent millions of Egyptians. For Egypt to be stable, let alone democratic, the Muslim Brotherhood has to be allowed to compete in elections at every level.

The U.S. has been a bystander in this revolution. This is not because it is incompetent, as many of its critics have charged. The events unfolding in Egypt are the product of a fast-moving, fluid situation in a country that is deeply polarized and in the midst of a social and political revolution. No outside power is going to accurately predict what will happen, nor should it try to do so. Egyptians will determine what will happen in Egypt and then the outside world will deal with these Egyptian realities.

Time.com

After the Coup

Egypt must reach out to the Islamists it is now jailing