Sarah Eltantawi sums up a disappointing ten months in Egypt. This was published at Fair Observer.
As I write this, a Coptic cathedral in Cairo’s Qalioubiyya has been attacked by masked gunmen during a funeral for victims of an earlier sectarian clash. If you had told me one year ago that I would be writing such a sentence about Egypt, I would probably not have believed you. It is not that there hasn’t been a long and worsening problem with sectarian attacks in Egypt – we only need to remember the horrific attack on the church in Alexandria on New Year’s Eve, 2010-2011, which foreshadowed the revolution to put this serious problem in perspective. But masked gunmen firing automatic rifles during a funeral? These were the problems, for example, of post-invasion Iraq, or a Pakistan which has been bedeviled for years now by a steadily failing state.
The Egyptian Government’s Performance
The unelected public prosecutor’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for the country’s most famous satirist, Bassem Youssef, known as Egypt’s “Jon Stewart” (of the popular American television show “The Daily Show”) for allegedly insulting Mohammed Morsi and insulting Islam is another recent ominous event, not least because there appeared to be little attempt to distinguish the two offenses. What has happened to bring Egypt to this point, just under ten months after the Muslim Brotherhood took power?
Before commencing a short review of the Muslim Brotherhood’s performance thus far, a word on the analytic frame employed to analyze the government’s performance. In what follows, I will list a number of important issues facing Egypt, and give a short synopsis of the progress that has been made or the lack thereof. There are observers of Egypt who would not find such an exercise useful in the first place. Their contention is that it is unrealistic to expect a transitional government to have accomplished much, especially under worsening economic conditions and in the context of a polarized country with a recalcitrant and unfocused opposition.
This is how I felt for the first six months. And while it remains utterly unrealistic to expect the government to have solved the massive problems facing Egypt, it is certainly fair enough to note what the government has been focusing on, what the government has been neglecting, and certain patterns of their actions.
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