Hazem Kandil is a fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and a lecturer in political sociology. Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt came out in 2012.
There is no getting around it. What Egypt has become three years after its once inspiring revolt is a police state more vigorous than anything we have seen since Nasser. As in the dark years of the 1960s, the enemy is everywhere, and any effort to expose and eradicate him is given popular assent. Since Egypt’s national security, its very existence as a sovereign state, is said to be at stake, those who refuse to toe the line must be ostracised, and those who persist punished as traitors. The talk of human rights that sustained the original uprising is dismissed as a distraction, the preoccupation of self-righteous amateurs.
This piece was first published, with a different heading, on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
Islamism was born in Egypt in 1928. And it was in Egypt, 85 years later, that the first successful uprising against an Islamist government occurred. The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood is a momentous event: but to foreign observers, the army’s intervention overshadowed everything else.
It is no longer fashionable to describe the events of 3 July in Cairo as a ‘second revolution’, but to describe them as a counter-revolution presupposes that there was a revolution in the first place.
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