Earlier this month, Americans celebrated the anniversary of the Congress that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, a rousing triumph of democracy.
This month also marks the tenth anniversary of another monumental achievement in democracy’s march: when thirty million people took to the streets of Egypt to demand an end to autocracy and corruption.
Yet unlike the handful of visionary leaders that gathered in Philadelphia, Egypt’s thirty million courageous democrats have largely been erased from collective memory and their message ignored.
Commentary on this tenth anniversary has been dominated by two narratives, neither of them fully accurate. Those sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam — including those tied to the Gulf monarchies that claim legitimacy through religion — decry the Egyptian military’s overthrow of the first elected president in Egyptian history. Those friendly to General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s regime in Egypt point out the authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies of the Muslim Brotherhood when it gained power. They paint Sisi as a national savior.
Unless we cut through these narratives, we will never hear the wise and beautiful message that the Egyptian people tried to deliver. That message is important, because it could very literally transform the world into one that is much freer, safer, and more prosperous.
The two narratives about events of June and July 2013, like almost every controversy within the Arab world, start from the false premise that only two political forces exist: secular authoritarianism and political Islamism. The despots’ apologists insist that only their strong hands can save us from the ravages of Islamic extremism. Both sides pretend that nobody in the region favors the secular democratic ideals we hold dear because those ideals pose a mortal threat both to autocracy and to political Islam.
The 2011 revolution against Egypt’s repressive dictator, Hosni Mubarak, brought together a wide swath of Egyptian society: students, trade unionists, secular democrats, adherents of Gamal Abdul Nasser or Anwar el-Sadat, and an eclectic range of Islamist groups. When the people forced Mubarak from power, the military stepped in and promised to oversee a transition to democratic rule.
This military government, like Mubarak before it, sought western support by warning of the dangers of political Islam. Domestically, however, it aligned itself with the Muslim Brotherhood to target repression upon the real threat: secular democrats. When it held a presidential election, it excluded all credible secular democratic candidates, allowing only a choice between generals, supporters of generals, and Islamists. Given that unattractive choice, voters narrowly chose the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi.
Rather than work with secular democrats to consolidate Egyptian democracy, the Brotherhood foolishly tried to entrench its own dominance in government. It manipulated voter lists, tried to skew elections for the upper house of parliament, and assaulted and arrested pro-democracy demonstrators. All this wildly overplayed the limited mandate it received in an election that was far from free or fair.
After a year, the Egyptian people had had enough. Thirty million took to the streets across the country, demanding that Morsi and the Brotherhood step down and agree to genuinely open, free elections. This was surely one of the largest public demonstrations on any issue anywhere in the history of humanity. It was everything we are told the Arab street is not: peaceful, secular, and pro-democratic.
A peaceful uprising by more than thirty million people in deeply religious Egypt against political Islam could have and should have rendered that movement untenable. If the Egyptian people could establish a secular democracy, both despots and Islamists throughout the region would be fatally undermined.
Yet what ought to have been one of democracy’s shining moments in world history was quickly thwarted when General Sisi exploited the popular anger to lead a military coup against Morsi.
The U.S. did not acquit itself well. Instead of supporting and amplifying the Egyptian people’s demands for true democracy, unshackled by religion or authoritarianism, we vacillated. We first promised Morsi that we would support his mandate and then acquiesced quickly in Sisi’s takeover. We made little effort to press Sisi to hold free elections and scarcely noticed his massacres of thousands of peaceful men, women, and children demonstrating for democracy, or his mass round-ups and torture of secular democratic opponents.
Today’s Egypt is wasting its enormous democratic and economic potential. Sisi seems determined to rule for life. All signs of dissent are being crushed, and he has even sought to aid Russia’s barbarous invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, corruption, mismanagement, and the Sisi’s vanity projects have brought the economy to its knees.
The Egyptian people deserve better. They have earned better. We should stop propping up Sisi. We should make all aid conditional on the freeing of dissidents, the restoration of a free press, and genuinely open elections in which secular democrats may run.
The Egyptian people may still set an example for the world, if we let them.
David A. Super is a professor at Georgetown Law.