Here come the Experts to tell us why we shouldn't worry about the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yes, we get it that the people who are running the revolution in Egypt appear to be a lot of middle class and jobless youth with Internet tools who seem to be the antithesis of backward extremist movements. Yes, we get it that while Muslim Brotherhood members have been arrested by the government in connection with the unrest, in fact the revolutionaries haven't chosen to focus on them so as not to distract from the cause. Yes, we get it that the situation is evolving and complex and confusing.
But I'm failing to see why we can't criticize the Muslim Brotherhood, and can't ask a lot of questions about this secretive Islamist movement that has been banned by the despotic Mubarak regime now being toppled in Egypt.
I'm putting this post on my blog about new media because I think there are a number of media-induced aspects to the framing of this debate, amplified and accelerated by new media, and that makes it difficult to have a critical and open discussion about this phenomenon. Already I've seen profound myopia and even looniness from a media researcher who refuses to accept my pointed -- and correct -- comment that there aren't very many women visible in the protests in Egypt. And I've seen the Egyptian revolution picked up uncritically as group-bonding experience for Internet denizens, whether they are Anonymous 4channers who are "helping" by practicing DDOS "civil disobedience", or buyers-remorseful Obama voters looking for something more dramatic to express their unhappiness than the complexities of health care.
A lot of the reportage making the claim that the demonstrators aren't like the Muslim Brotherhood seem to establish this claim merely by invoking their youth, their jeans, or their use of Facebook, without doing much actual polling of their views.
I've written in the past about the left's aversion to condemning extremism and violence, and forthrightly making the critical separation and distance between advocating for the rights of victims of oppression, which might include extremist Muslims, and those extremists' own views which are antithetical particularly to women's rights and intellectual and religious freedom -- this was exemplified in the story of Amnesty International and Gita Sahgal, the former women's rights program officer who departed. I've also written about the global left's increasing unwillingness to insist on nonviolence and even its tendency to provoke and celebrate violence, as in the Gaza flotilla tragedy.
The theory of the Muslim Bros goes like this:
o if you criticize them, you must be for Mubarak -- a despot who lorded over a corrupt and abusive regime for three decades where dissidents and rebels have been arrested and tortured and civil society oppressed
o if you criticize them, you must be ignorant of history and culture and the many nuances of this complex movement
o if you criticize them, you must be prejudiced against Muslims
o if you criticize them, you must be an uncritical supporter of Israel or even part of a Zionist lobby
o if you criticize them, you must not be aware of all the moderate things the Bros have been doing and their acceptance in the revolutionary coalition
o if you criticize them, you must be part of the American Tea Party or conservative right-wing
o if you criticize them, you must fail to see the good social welfare work they do among poor people
So, that's a pretty stacked deck, and many a timid soul stops with their worried thoughts and their misgivings, seeing this stacked deck. Not I.
The first thing to admit about the Muslim Brotherhood is that nobody is an expert. That comes as quite a shock and surprise to some who have based their entire careers on being regional Middle East experts who are now being quoted everywhere about this movement, and comes as a challenge even to the manhood of various intrepid young scouts from the global wired left backpacking around Cairo and tweeting their impressions "from the ground".
Too bad, I'll repeat it again: nobody is an expert.
The reason is very simple: the movement is a secret, banned, Islamist movement and nobody has ever seen what they would be like if and when they came to power. That's all. So everybody is guessing, nobody is an expert, nobody can point to some other country -- or Egypt itself -- where this movement has been in power, so we can't know. We'll see.
Next, nobody can be sure that this movement, which says it is moderate and is shying away from the imposition of a Caliphate or the use of violence or even some aggressive agenda with regard to Israel or the suppression of women, in fact has control of all its factions or in fact is telling the truth about what it will do.
ElBaradei, the moderate who has emerged as a leader of the "big tent" is waiving away concerns about Islamist fundamentalists saying that those who ask this question are just like the Mubarak regime, invoking Islamism in order to justify oppression.
No, I'm not. I'm invoking Islamism because it has been used to oppress other people in Iran, in Algeria, in Afghanistan and other countries, including in countries where it is supposed to be moderate, and -- again -- we don't know how this historical moment will play out.
Women in Tunisia demonstrating against the return of some extreme Islamists don't waive away these concerns like ElBaradei -- but, oh, I suppose in the next minute we'll hear they are tools of the regime and justifying past oppression.
Groups that have their history in the underground and who have faced torture and oppression learn subterfuge and live the life of partisans. That doesn't lend itself to being open and transparent and saying what you're really about. Therefore it's more than fine to ask questions about intentions and plans -- and to worry out loud how it might turn out. Doing that is what I call "walking and chewing gum at the same time" -- it doesn't mean you advocate their oppression or side with their oppressors, it means you care about universal human rights for all.
After all, tons of middle-class Egyptians who have become more secularized, including many making this revolution themselves, are asking these very questions themselves, but maybe not out loud.
They may not be able to ask them out loud if they feel they are in a politically constrained situation where to ask them out loud looks like a) playing into the hands of their oppressor they're trying to get rid of and b) playing into the hands of putative propper-uppers of their oppressor, like America.
But we don't have to live by those constraints -- and we shouldn't.
To the extent this revolution *does* turn out better, it will be because not only we, but people for whom it is a life and death matter in their own country get to ask this question, and those being asked the question dispel doubts not by dispelling debate, but by actually going ahead and tolerating women's rights and other human rights as well as peaceful dissent and a negotiated process to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
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