Egypt's Turmoil

"We must be alert lest we slide into a civil war that does not differentiate between supporters and opponents."
Sheik Hassan al-Shafie, senior cleric, Al-Azhar

The issue obviously is the stark division between supporters and opponents of the Islamist government of President Mohammad Morsi, fully engaged not with the needs of 21st Century Egypt, but the consolidation of power of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not only in Egypt proper, but in the greater Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood has spent almost a century abiding its time as a censured and outlawed religious-social-ideological movement.

One that has conspired to take Muslims back to the pure time of their ancestral devotion of the Prophet Mohammad and the Koranic principles of owing all to Islam, complete submission in every aspect of life from cradle to grave, no side issues required -- for unquestioning faith in Islam fulfills human destiny. Even before the latter years when they achieved a quasi respectability and were permitted unmolested-by-the-state existence as a nascent political body, they waited.

They groomed themselves as a well-organized theocratic ideology and they assiduously courted the approval of the populace, by providing fundamental humanitarian aid to the hosts of poverty-stricken Egyptians. They did this in every country where they have long had a presence, from Somalia to Jordan, Syria to Libya. They are Islamists, not as fanatical as the Salafists, but fundamentalist in their outlook, eager to sacrifice all to a universal Caliphate.

The imposition of Sharia law is the goal, and with it the eventual spread of Islam, to gradually invite non-Muslims into the fold, and to enlarge the ummah, the global spread of Islam into a wider community manipulable by their shared faith into a cohesive, controlled entirety. Since Egypt was its birthplace, the advent of the Arab Spring that brought down the military government and the general-turned-president Hosni Mubarak, presented its first advantaged success.

But under the one-year rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists the country has retrogressed with its growing unemployment, its failing economy, its rising crime rate depressing tourism, and its cost of living making the acquisition of the basic needs of its citizens increasingly more difficult. The anniversary of Mohammad Morsi's inauguration has turned into a mass condemnation with his opponents presenting a list of signatures totalling over 22-million who wish him and his party to be gone.

Cairo International Airport, in anticipation of the conflicts between the polarizing views of the secular-socialist part of Egypt and the Islamist demographic, has been flooded with anxious departures, a mass exodus of unprecedented numbers of Egyptians willing to leave their country for fear of what will next result as the opposing sides threaten one another, confront one another and converge in common public areas.

Each side will wait for the police to intervene, to act to secure a measure of calm, but calm is now evasive, as evasive as the responsibility that President Morsi is so unwilling to accept for his role in the destabilization of the most populous country in the Middle East, floundering in social, economic and religious failures. The trusted military hints it will become engaged rather than see civil war erupt, but to do so would return the military to government.

Angry protesters are targeting the vestiges most visible of Muslim Brotherhood control in the country, setting fire to local Muslim Brotherhood headquarters of the Freedom  Justice Party. While supporters of the government have surrounded the presidential palace in Cairo to ensure that no one mounts entry, despite its recently-erected containing wall, built to protect from invading protests.

thenational.ae

A bitter irony that an Arab population in Egypt which deplores the safety-and-security wall that Israel was forced to build to put a halt to the ongoing deadly suicide bombings launched by Palestinians against Israelis, to separate them effectively now has its counterpart, where the government of Egypt has had to erect a similarly-purposed wall, to keep the citizens of Egypt from destroying the edifice representing government and ministerial executive control of the country.