President Morsi is looking for a tutor to teach him the laws of floating; the law whereby Mubarak ruled for thirty years. Yet how would the ideologist, the project owner, the faithful Muslim Brotherhood’s delegate and the spearhead of the Islamic rule float?

President Morsi is looking for a tutor to teach him the laws of floating; the law whereby Mubarak ruled for thirty years. Yet how would the ideologist, the project owner, the faithful Muslim Brotherhood’s delegate and the spearhead of the Islamic rule float?

Having the lightness for floating, Mubarak chose the position of an officer with his drawers, files and long heritage whereby he entered a palace— left by his predecessors Sadat and Abdel Nasser— as a field for interior and exterior battles, a choice considered as heroism by various classes and segments exhausted by the wars of the president – hero of the revolution, war and peace – and eager to live in a security the new officer president promised to provide by freezing and shelving all files.

The law is based on ‘freezing’ the political, geographical, and cultural position of Egypt and its ‘hot’ weight as an engine transporting the region between modernity and backwardness, between authoritarianism and democracy, between the fifth century and the twenty first century, between the sacred and the chaotic, between stability and revolution, and between oil and Facebook.

For Mubarak, floating was a choice fitting with his nature. Additionally, the way he came to power following a climaxed drama – killing the ruler during a military parade – made it possible to control spillovers but by pushing them into the ‘freezer’ of wisdom and the officer’s eternal drawers, and by subjecting Egypt’s position, as a political and symbolic capital, to negotiation rather than interaction.

Because of this equation, the growth of Muhammad Ali’s state project did not go beyond bureaucracy-imposing limits, and the post-1952 revolution military institution (the solid nucleus) changed its aim from ‘preparedness for fighting’ to strengthening its bureaucracy, by freezing its fighting sense and efficiency as the region’s largest army and extending its direct control over economy and its indirect control over the power structure.

A partnership was held between Morsi, or more accurately his Brotherhood, and the military institution after a hard time during which the later was unprecedentedly involved in interior wars against citizens. The partnership aimed at changing the post-revolution imbalance where the solid nucleus lost its position, and it seemed that the whole ‘state’ was more resembling a state of hierarchs aware of supreme interests from their secret rooms, and of a people or maybe a herd roaming in public squares to operate the bigger machine.

The price the military institution has paid for directing the fighting sense (the bureaucracy of the army administration) against Egyptian citizens was accepting to become the Brotherhood’s partner in a ruling establishment, with American sponsorship, that is still unstably floating with the president, who has sluggish thoughts that he is a ‘Commander of the Faithful’ rather than a president.

Seduced by the Gaza successes in reaching a compromise between Hamas and Israel, Morsi thought that he could be that ‘Sunni monster’ who would revive the glories of Nasserism without Abdel Nasser and under the flag of Islam, instead of Abdel Nasser’s ideological flag of nationalism. However, this seduction vanished under urgent ‘Mubaraki’ requirements but without Mubarak.

How would the Commander of the Faithful govern a state in the footsteps of the officer?

The question was practically answered by ‘empowering’ the Brotherhood to control institutions they got drowned in later, as modest competencies led to catastrophes summarized by people’s clear slogan ‘The country is being drowned.’

Though the majority of Egyptians are against war with Israel, the sense of danger pushed some to call for waging a war (against terrorism in Sinai, and against Ethiopia during the Nile water crisis). And it is common at drowning moments that some cry, recalling the heroism of Mubarak’s predecessors, while others mock, comparing between what the Brotherhood’s delegate to the presidential palace is doing in reality and their bravado before coming to power.

Drowning feelings is confusing; this is why ‘the Commander of the Faithful’ must learn how to float.