Cairo: In a reversal of fortunes unthinkable a year and-a-half ago, an Islamist jailed by Hosni Mubarak has succeeded him as president of the biggest Arab nation in a victory at the ballot box which has historic consequences for Egypt and the Middle East.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Mursi will not enjoy the extent of modern, pharaonic powers exercised by Mubarak: those have been curtailed by a military establishment which will decide just how much he will be able to do in government.
Still, the US-trained engineer’s victory in the country’s first free presidential election breaks a tradition of domination by men from the armed forces, which have provided every Egyptian leader since the overthrow of the monarchy 60 years ago, and installs in office a group that drew on 84 years of grassroots activism to catapult Mursi into the presidency.
He has promised a moderate, modern Islamist agenda to steer Egypt into a new democratic era where autocracy will be replaced by transparent government that respects human rights and revives the fortunes of a powerful Arab state long in decline. Mursi is promising an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.
Yet the stocky, bespectacled 60-year old, appears something of an accidental president: he was only flung into the race at the last moment by the disqualification on a technicality of Khairat Al Shater, by far the group’s preferred choice.
With a stiff and formal style, Mursi cast himself as a reluctant late comer to the race. He struggled to shake off his label as the Brotherhood’s “spare tyre”.
Questions remain over the extent to which Mursi will operate independently of other Brotherhood leaders once in office: his manifesto was drawn up by the group’s policymakers. The role Shater might play has been one focus of debate in Egypt.
“I will treat everyone equally and be a servant of the Egyptian people,” Mursi said at his campaign headquarters in Cairo shortly after polling ended, a week before his victory was confirmed by the Mubarak-era body overseeing the vote.
But many Egyptians, not least the Christian minority, remain suspicious of Mursi and even more so of the group he represents.
Anti-Brotherhood sentiment, fuelled by both a hostile media and some of the group’s policies, has soared in recent weeks.
Divided nation
Ahmad Shafiq, the former general he defeated, won nearly as many votes as Mursi, signalling that Egypt is a nation that is anything but united around the idea of Brotherhood rule. Mursi won a little less than a quarter of the first-round vote in May.
That a man who served as Mubarak’s last prime minister was so close to victory has been seen as one sign of failure by the Brotherhood - which has described itself as the victim of a vicious campaign orchestrated by its enemies.
At first, Mursi pitched himself as a conservative Islamist — the only one in the field, he said. He repeatedly promised to implement Islamic law in speeches peppered with references to God, the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and the Quran.
“It was for the sake of the Islamic Sharia that men were ... thrown into prison. Their blood and existence rests on our shoulders now,” Mursi said in one of his early campaign rallies.
Though not one of those jailed for years, he was held on more than one occasion by Mubarak’s feared state security men.
But he has seldom spelled out what precisely his call to implement Sharia, or Islamic law, would mean for Egypt, where piety runs deep and the constitution already defines the principles of the sharia as the main source of legislation.
Mursi has said Brotherhood rule would not mean that Egypt will be a theocracy, adding that there is little difference between the phrase “the principles of the sharia” — the term found in the current constitution — and the Sharia itself.
In a gesture to Jama’a Al Islamiya, one such group, Mursi pledged to work for the release of Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, a militant preacher imprisoned in the United States for planning the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.
Another cleric, the independent Safwat Al Hejazi, added a radical flavour to Mursi’s early campaign, taking to the stage at his events to call for a Muslim super-state across the Middle East with Jerusalem as its capital — a direct challenge to Israel with whom Mubarak maintained a 33-year-old peace treaty.
Mursi subsequently distanced himself from such statements, but not before the Shafiq campaign had used them to great effect to paint the Brotherhood’s man as a dangerous radical.
Asked about Al Hejazy’s remarks, Mursi later spoke of European Union-style integration for the Arab world and an Arab common market. “Jerusalem is in our hearts and vision,” he said. “But Cairo is Egypt’s capital.”
Switch
As he readied himself for the run-off against Shafiq, Mursi switched to a more inclusive message and portrayed himself as defender of the “January 25 revolution” that toppled Mubarak — an uprising initially led not by the wary Brotherhood but by mainly secular, liberal groups among Egypt’s urban youth.
The Brotherhood has long been at the heart of the movement for democratic reform in Egypt, but he was a hard sell to many of those youth activists, who said his group was slow to join the anti-Mubarak uprising and who subsequently accused the Brotherhood of cosying up to the generals who then took over.
Mursi won few open endorsements from politicians and parties beyond the various Islamist factions, though the “April 6 movement” — one of the protest groups that ignited the anti-Mubarak revolt — was a notable exception.
“We face a decisive moment in our history, we must halt the farce of the former regime,” Mursi said in one of his last television interviews before the run-off. “We face a new era and we cannot allow the return of the former regime.”
Mursi worked to address some of the criticisms faced by his group. In the last week of his campaign, he put in writing his promises of an inclusive administration, to protect media freedom and those of minorities, including Christians whose fear of the Islamists drove many of them to vote for Shafiq.
He also sought to reassure the generals about his group’s intentions. In a June 14 interview, he said the Brotherhood would seek agreement with the military over the next defence minister. The army, he said, would also remain “protector of the interior” for up to two years while the Interior Ministry — a largely unreformed vestige of Mubarak’s rule — was restructured.
In any case, the army enacted a court order that same day to dissolve the Brotherhood-led parliament and, as polling ended, issued a decree taking legislative power for itself, among measures that will sharply constrain the presidency.
