Researcher and political science professor Ashraf Al-Sherif considers the economic political crisis and the relationship between the state, society and individual citizens to be the biggest challenge facing the current Egyptian regime. A professor at the American University in Egypt and the non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Institute for Middle East Studies Al-Sherif believes that the state has abandoned its main role of safeguarding traditional legal procedures, since it no longer pays enough attention to legal formalities, rather it rules from a security approach.

Researcher and political science professor Ashraf Al-Sherif considers the economic political crisis and the relationship between the state, society and individual citizens to be the biggest challenge facing the current Egyptian regime. A professor at the American University in Egypt and the non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Institute for Middle East Studies Al-Sherif believes that the state has abandoned its main role of safeguarding traditional legal procedures, since it no longer pays enough attention to legal formalities, rather it rules from a security approach.

 Sherif gives his insight into the recent demonstrations, the first nationwide protest movement since Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi rose to power in June 2014.

Professor Al-Sherif, please tell us about your views regarding the protests on 15 April?

What happened on “Al-Ard Friday” must be read in the right terms. Those angry, discontent and dreaming revolutionaries achieved what was unattainable in the last three years. Taking the anger to the street and attacking Abdulfattah Al-Sisi directly was impossible in the last three years. Reclaiming the right to demonstrate is a big achievement, yet we have not created a large movement in the Egyptian society. The grand majority of Egyptians is not interested in the islands issue, but they have seen that the regime has neutralized the will of the people. Therefore, the majority did not react negatively to the protests, even though they are not generally against the regime.

Let us talk about the reasons behind these protests, more specifically the sea border agreement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The information we have about the subject is scarce, yet the issue has both internal and regional aspects. Saudi Arabia is now engaged in buying loyalties to boost its regional status and re-design the region on sectarian basis, creating a mass of moderate Sunni countries alongside Israel to stand up to Iran. For Saudi Arabia the issue is symbolic, but for Israel, it is more than that. Israel wants to extend the Red Sea security agreements from Camp David to include all the relevant parties, as Al-Sisi himself once said.

As for the Egyptian regime, the agreement came as a response to financial difficulties, which is an unprecedented event in the Egyptian history. By taking this step, President Al-Sisi crossed two red lines, he not only conceded Egyptian land, but he also conceded Egypt’s leading role in the region to the Saudis.  

How do you read the Egyptian struggle with the state about the knowledge in these matters?

The concession was made without a good scenario. The state did not come forth with an official narrative to justify its deed, instead the information center in the government presented a bundle of letters from Ismat Abdullmajeed, the former Egyptian Foreign Minister and an article by Mohammad El-Baradei. In his turn, President Al-Sisi said to the Egyptian people “If you trust me, I do not want anyone to talk about the issue.”

We are facing a regime that is dissolving its authoritative speech and its legitimacy to respond to a major crisis. On the popular level, some people tried to find historical stories and documents to justify the decision, and this is a dangerous shift in the Egyptian dialogue –people now are debating the issue based on their views of the regime. The regime supporters for example no longer give any attention to facts, rather they side with the regime anyway.

Let us talk about the alternative, the bogey man usually used by the regime.

If we go back to the diaries and journals of the post 1952 revolution era, we find out that the officers who took over had very poor political and administrative experience. The coalition of the 25th of January revolution in 2011 have a much better knowledge in the matter. In 1952, the members of the revolutionary council were very young, back then Jamal Abdul Nasser was only 34 and the oldest member Mohammad Najib was 50 –he was later excluded.

The July 1952 revolution experience was based on learning from mistakes, so at the beginning, Egypt was confused between aligning with the United States or with the Soviet Union until it joined the non-aligned nations. Back then, the revolution did not provide an alternative, the revolution began on the premise, “If we have no alternative, why should we support the regime despite it being the problem?”

Alternatives do not come from a vacuum; rather they are created by movement. I do not understand supporting a dysfunctional regime simply because we do not have an alternative. The alternative must respond to the people’s needs and it will reveal itself through movement.

The absence of the alternative is due to five crises: We first have a problem with the political project, and we need to break out of the duality of the army and the Isla mists. We also have an organizational crisis, we do not have experience of collective work outside of the state, the only three factions who do are the Muslim Brotherhood, the Coptic Church and Al-Ahli football club, and all of these examples are based on emotions or religious sentiment.

The third crisis is financial. The fourth crisis is the lack of a popular base, any political party stands on two popular masses, the first is completely affiliated (party members) and the second is a group of people the party can convince in elections, and the only party that had a popular base was the Muslim Brotherhood.

The army in turn has its supporters, although it is not legal for the army as a sovereign institution to engage in politics. The final crisis we have has to do with leadership, we do not have a visionary politician who understands the streets. As a result, we may not have an alternative, but since the regime is unable to come up with solutions, we have no way but to move forward.

Politics is similar to physics, any vacuum must be filled. The islands case is extremely important in terms of pressuring the state. If the state held a referendum, it would be a step towards opening the political sphere. If the youth came up with new ideas and a good organization, new elite would form. The problem of alternatives is a major crisis but it does not justify passivity and not moving forward.

You were originally a researcher of Islamic studies, how do you relate to this subject at the moment? What is the future of Islamism? Will it initiate new movements?

What happened in June 30, 2013 happened only in Egypt, and Islamist movements are still in the ruling formations in many Islamic countries. Yet Egypt is still considered the center of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. I talked to a group of Islamist youth and they told me that what they are going through now is similar to what leftists and Arab nationalists went through after the 1967 loss.

Political Islam has received a massive blow in Egypt, yet the Islamic awakening has created general ideas that are stronger than movements. The Muslim Brotherhood Project was defeated in Egypt, and I do not see the ISIS project succeeding here. However, a quarter of the voting mass in Egypt used to vote for the Islamists, and no other movement has attracted these votes. This vacuum will allow the return of Islamists in different forms. For the time being, Islamists are in an observing mode and they will not take part in any upcoming movements due to their bad situation and their major internal struggles. They are now pondering and reading western philosophy, trying to form a network of intellectuals and activists, however their plans are dependent on political opportunity.

Where lies the problem then?

The problem is that the Egyptian people do not want to pay the necessary price of reform and they cling to stability. We tried stability on a stagnant basis in the days of Mubarak. Many sectors of the Egyptian society do not want to pay any price and the state in turn does not want to make any concessions. Ever since 2011, we have been ignoring politics. We talk about the constitution and the ruling form without paying much attention to issues like the distribution of wealth and how to reform the state.

I do not find this intentional ignorance strange. The population does not want to pay the price, so they turn to myth, like thinking “the army will solve all the problems.” However, when they discover that this is a myth they feel afraid, they see history being shaped only by the unknown on the horizon, so they stop thinking.

In turn, the rich classes in Egypt live an impossible equation in a poor and uneducated county. The wealth gap is enormous, and still, they want low violence and crime rates, and they want the poor classes to be more productive and to pay taxes. The middle class in Egypt is not better off, this class has taken the burden of the January 2011 uprising, and when they saw what is needed is drastic solutions, like changing the entire ruling class, they took a step back and returned to conservative positions. The solutions include a revision of our moral and educational values and our beliefs about the relationship between the state and citizenry as much as the relationship between parents and children. The solution for everyone was merely an escape from problems; while in fact it is much more than that, and the current situation no longer makes any sense.

The price needed to fix the country is increasing by day. If the reform in the judicial and police systems had begun in 2011, we would be in a much better position now. The state institutions are now in conflict with each other. The ruling class’ notion of control does not exceed the security level, as though nothing had changed since the Mubarak era.

You have written about the Hussein Sidki (actor and producer 1917 – 1977), describing him as the representative of Egyptian patriotism, do aim to equate a persona with a concept or a complex idea?

We need to adapt a new approach to political sociology by pondering the Egyptian arts and cultural heritage. I wrote about Hussein Sidki as some sort of humor even though I deem art to be a very affective sociological tool. We all appreciate Nabi Farouk, and I think Al-Sisi considers him the most important Egyptian author (the President introduced the Impossible Man series, about the heroism of the Egyptian intelligence, in all his meetings with Egyptian intellectuals). Farouk helped shape the views of the Egyptian youth about the national identity and the secret and intelligence services.

Moreover, the Egyptian national narrative in the last 30 years was inspired by a television series written by Sale Mursi (1926 – 1996) like Rafat Al-Hagan trilogy (1987 – 1990 – 1991), and Tears in Rude Eyes (1981). However, the most important narrative about Jamal Abdul Nasser and his era we find in the works of Osama Anwar Okasha (1941 – 2010). I am interested in the commercial arts, for they provide a clear picture of the stats’ relationship with society, and more importantly the ethics in society.

I want to write about the history of the generations who rose up in January 2011, those who were born in the late seventies and eighties in terms of the commercial literature they grew up with. I want to study them through the characters and experiences they saw and how this literature and the cultural media and political atmosphere that played a role pushing them towards revolution.

For these young men and women, January 25 was a fight with their consciousness, especially since the Mubarak era was not documented in literature, due to the cultural infertility the country suffered under his regime. Researchers and intellectuals had not recorded what was happening around them in those days because they were busy with old and out dated debates about the days of Abdul Nasser and Anwar Al-Sadat. Only few paid attention to that era like the literary figures Nael Al-Toukhi and Mohammad Rabea, or the analyst Samer Solaiman who analyzed the Mubarak regime finances in his book “The Powerful Regime and the Weak State” in 2004. I want to set a free account about the era without restriction to literary language or scientific analysis, and I want to show how the January revolution erupted against the president’s National Party and then against the president himself.

The ruling class has burdened society with the fake concept of “patriotism,” a word that was linked in society’s mind to the image the regime had designed of the central patriarchal authority: ethics, moderate religious belief, the poetic sense of identity, Mubarak and his motionless face, Al-Sisi with his fascist face and numerous other faces. The January revolution sought freedom in the sense of reshaping the country with a new political and social contract. It aimed at asking existential questions about the meaning of the homeland, about us as individuals, about our relationship with country and about our relationship with the world.

These questions were asked in a moment of despair. Therefore, we are trying to break down the basic narrative of the country by breaking down this major event.