Islamists in Egypt face popular backlash
Abigail Hauslohner ("The Washington Post," August 2, 2013)
Cairo - It is no longer cool to have a beard.
Islamist president Mohamed Morsi is out. His opponents, a military-backed
interim government of secularists, are in. And if you’ve got a beard — that
most conspicuous symbol of Islamism in post-Arab Spring Egypt — you’re
likely to get taunted on the metro, harassed in the souk and possibly even
assaulted, according to conservative Muslims.
A month after a military coup ousted Morsi and landed his top cohorts in
the Muslim Brotherhood behind bars, a popular backlash against the Islamists
who governed for just over a year is palpable far beyond the halls of
power. It is evident in the sidewalk conversations, the grocery lines and the
television talk shows.
Criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood had been building for months, as
citizens griped about a declining economy and what some called the group’s
determination to dominate this nation’s power structure. But since Morsi was
toppled, the complaints have exploded into a full-throttled fury at his
supporters, demonstrating the dangerous polarization in this nation that is a
key
U.S. ally.
In the weeks since the July 3 coup, Egypt’s military and the interim
government — which is made up largely of liberals and stalwarts of the Hosni
Mubarak era — have cast Morsi’s Islamist supporters as evil-willed “terrorists,
” child abusers and spies. The Egyptian media have whipped up the
anti-Islamist fervor with dramatic reports that the Muslim Brotherhood
dismisses as
lies.
On the streets, where hundreds of thousands of ordinary Egyptians joined
protests in June to oust Morsi, there is a willing audience for the new
government’s charges.
“The treatment has changed for the worse,” said Osama Ibrahim, an imam at
a Cairo mosque that caters to hard-line Islamists.
The nation’s turmoil has seeped into his daily life in the Cairo
neighborhood of Ain Shams, he said. “On the metro, they call us names. People
come up
to us and say, ‘How are you, Sheik Morsi?’” he said.
He said his wife, who wears a face veil, saw men in their neighborhood yank
the veil off another woman draped in black. At another point, local men
stopped the couple’s car and barred them from entering a marketplace, Ibrahim
said, because of the way they were dressed.
“You have to understand: The minibuses don’t even stop for me anymore,” he
said.
The tensions are quickly rising. Thousands of Morsi’s Islamist supporters
marched through the streets Friday, and police clashed with pro-Morsi
demonstrators outside the suburban headquarters of several local television
networks as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns landed in the
Egyptian capital for a last-minute diplomatic push to avert violence.
Egypt’s security forces are preparing to break up the sprawling pro-Morsi
encampments that have taken over major roads in eastern and central
districts of the city.
The Obama administration is working with European and Persian Gulf nations
to try to reinforce messages of calm to both the interim Egyptian
government and the Muslim Brotherhood. Secretary of State John F. Kerry met
Friday
in London with Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed, foreign minister of the United Arab
Emirates, whose government is in close contact with the Egyptian military
and interim government. Separately, Kerry and other U.S. officials have
sought help from Qatar, which has close ties to the Brotherhood.
“All of the parties involved have a responsibility to be inclusive, to work
towards a peaceful resolution. The last thing that we want is more
violence,” Kerry said before his meeting in London.
At a Friday news conference, officials from Egypt’s State Information
Service and the state-run National Council for Women accused the Islamists at
the largest pro-Morsi encampment, in eastern Cairo, of “trafficking” and
abusing children, exploiting Syrian refugee youths and “training terrorists.”
“The battle being fought in Egypt is a war against terrorism,” said
Mohammed Badreddin Zayed, the head of the State Information Service. Officials
aired footage of children chanting for martyrdom and wearing the white
shrouds that Muslims use to cloak their dead. They also passed out a DVD
labeled “
Violence of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Although some of the government’s allegations are clearly exaggerated, the
rights group Amnesty International said Friday that it had interviewed
opponents of Morsi who said they were tortured inside sit-ins supporting the
former president. The report reflected the danger of further bloodshed in a
conflict that has left at least 140 dead, most of them Morsi supporters
killed by Egyptian security forces.
But the domestic media have largely echoed the government line, tapping
into Egyptians’ xenophobia and casting the Brotherhood as linked to foreign
plots.
“The conspiracy between the West and the Muslim Brotherhood has been
revealed,” Gaber al-Qarmuty declared on his show “Our Country” on the
liberal-oriented ONTV on Wednesday night. He ran footage of a truck full of
individually wrapped packages that he described as being Molotov cocktails en
route
to a pro-Morsi demonstration.
Egypt’s television stations, a mix of government-controlled and privately
run channels, have enormous influence in this poverty-stricken society in
which conspiracy theories are rife and education standards are poor.
Qarmuty likened Morsi’s supporters to brainwashed peasants, accusing them
of transforming their protest camp into a public toilet, and appealing to
Egyptians’ highly traditional social mores.
“Is it okay for your wife or daughter to look from your balcony and to see
someone taking a shower and going to the bathroom? Is this okay?” Qarmuty
implored his viewers.
A popular talk-show host, Tawfiq Okasha, has repeatedly urged Egyptians to
take to the streets alongside the police in what he calls the defense of
their nation against terrorism.
“Go and stand by the police and be one hand with the security forces,”
Okasha told his viewers Monday night after announcing that police were
clashing with pro-Morsi demonstrators in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura.
In the poor and conservative neighborhood of Imbaba, which the Islamists
once claimed as a stronghold, Rageb Amin, a barber, has stayed silent as the
anti-Islamist vitriol has seeped into his customers’ conversations.
“People say that in Rabaa, they take hostages and kill them,” Amin said,
referring to the site of the main pro-Morsi sit-in. He still backs Morsi and
thinks the allegations are lies. But speaking up would spell “problems,”
he said.
Other former Brotherhood supporters have swayed to the popular narrative.
Sherif Said, an employee in a steel rebar warehouse, said he planned to
shave his beard because his bosses persuaded him to abandon the Islamist
cause.
“This guy used to be with the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Mohamed Zeitoun,
Said’s boss. “He was talking about ‘legitimacy’ up until last week,” he
said, in a reference to Morsi’s standing as an elected president. “But we
convinced him not to be with the Brotherhood,” Zeitoun added as Said watched,
wide-eyed and silent.
Michael Birnbaum and Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo and Anne Gearan in London
contributed to this report.
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