Freed Reformist Sees Hope for Islamic Democracies

The following is a summary of an OSI Forum, "The Battle for Civil Society in Egypt," that was held on May 5, 2003. The summary is reprinted courtesy of EurasiaNet , the news and information website of OSI's Central Eurasia Project.

An Egyptian activist who spent nearly three years as a political defendant and prisoner sees strong hopes for a "democratic transformation" in the Middle East. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociology professor, has begun efforts to gather other democratization advocates from his region and beyond. His hope is to establish a blueprint that countries can draw on to shift out of authoritarian regimes into open ones.

And, he says, he is more optimistic about this project than he was before the American-led invasion of Iraq or the reanimation of peace talks among Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian terrorist groups. "Iraq has a good opportunity to develop a reasonable pluralistic system," he says. "It has social and cultural pluralism, and a nicely crafted political system [should] reflect social realities on the ground."

At a recent open forum of the Open Society Institute in New York, Dr. Ibrahim called for a "coalition of the conscientious" to oppose both invasion and dictatorship, and said such a coalition could seize desire in Muslim-majority countries for real democracy. After hosting roundtables over the summer, he hopes to build a media network to tap that desire within 12 months. "We don't have comparative advantage [against madrassas and extremists], we have only access to the elite intelligentsia through our newsletter," he told EurasiaNet in a telephone interview after the forum. "We can reach thousands or tens of thousands. We need millions." (Dr. Ibrahim has appealed for funding from the Soros Foundations Network, which funds EurasiaNet.)

Ibrahim's optimism does not reflect naiveté. Egyptian police arrested him and two of his employees at gunpoint in 2000 and detained him for 45 days without charges. He told the New York crowd that at midnight on Friday, June 30, he heard loud banging on his door and opened it, expecting that his son had forgotten his keys. Instead, he said, he faced an armed official with some 30 deputies. When he asked one for a court order, he says he was told: "I give the orders."

Officials searched his apartment and led him outside, he says, where he saw "200 [soldiers] and 15 to 20 armored cars – enough to invade a small town." Ibrahim chairs the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo; he also led a team of monitors whose report on Egypt's 1995 elections led 18 losing candidates to successfully sue the government. With a few months to go before another election, Ibrahim said, "a confrontation had been building" between him and President Hosni Mubarak.

At the Center, he continued, he found his accountant and her assistant blindfolded; the accountant was hysterical, Ibrahim said. The woman, a Sudanese refugee who had made a home in Egypt "had always been apolitical," Ibrahim explained. But the blindfolding and the arrest – which occurred because she had stayed late on Friday night to close the Center's accounting books for the fiscal year – "really politicized her in one night."

Three years of trials and jail time ensued; Ibrahim said he refused the government's first offer, to go free after a summer and "keep his mouth shut." Instead, he gave a lecture when he returned to the American University in Cairo that drew thousands. He experienced more interrogation and jail time. In March, after the Bush administration intervened on his behalf, a state court acquitted him of all the government's eventual charges. When he and his staff returned to the Center, he said, "it was like the National Museum of Baghdad." All the computers were gone, and the office was unusable. Despite the "sad scene," Ibrahim reported "a consensus that we must reopen."

Ibrahim is eager to use the disappearance of "the worst of all the dictators" to prod for methodical reinvention of governments throughout the Middle East. He offers the Ibn Khaldun Center, which he described as operating with "a score of old staffers and new interns" as a base for roundtables and, eventually, training sessions. "A combination of internal and external pressure is needed to make democracy more genuine and more forceful," he said. By analyzing countries that have been democracies for a generation (such as Portugal) and ones where reform is more fragile (such as Bosnia), Ibrahim hopes to attract "like-minded people" to a formal "transitology" program.

"We hope to encourage whatever civil society organizations exist to be more involved in the process of thinking about the future," he said in the follow-up interview. "Politicians, especially those who have been in exile and who are jockeying for position, are not used to strategic planning." The roundtables this summer, he said, will serve as a gauge for interest in future training. Ibrahim says his network hopes to visit Eastern European organizations in the autumn and potentially meet with Central Asian democracy advocates thereafter.

His experience in his home country actually buoys some of his optimism. Generally, Ibrahim said, civil society organizations who would change Egypt should engage in structured dialogue and involve indigenous groups. He noted that Egypt had shown promising signs since late 2002. The government officially acknowledged the Coptic celebration of Christmas, suggested it would appoint a woman to the Supreme Constitutional Court, dismantled some of the more notorious kangaroo courts and spoke of creating a state commission on human rights. "Let's start with whatever we can start with," Ibrahim told the New York audience. He hopes to foster meaningful democratization within five years, allowing that he may end up back in prison.

The professor also does not discount the extent of popular anger in Muslim societies. Ibrahim said that the Bush administration's interference on his behalf was "at first like a kiss of death" in Egypt, where the United States is as unpopular as it has ever been. The professor attributed this unpopularity to a widespread perception that the American government had given a "green light" to Israeli incursions into Palestinian territory. While he is encouraged by stirrings in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Ibrahim said on May 31, he finds Afghanistan's descent into lawlessness disheartening. "Neglect should come to an end and [the Americans] should be more proactive," says Ibrahim, who has made his case to US President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice. "This is a region where each part affects the rest."