The Abuse of Language as a Means to Sordid Ends

We need a new vocabulary to place the Second Egyptian Revolution in its proper context.  A lot of verbiage has been produced especially by the opponents of a secular Egypt.  Their language is a mere cover-up to a sordid end.  Their end is the resurrection of the Islamist regime of Mohamed Morsi and the marginalization of more than half of the Egyptian electorate who rose up against it on June 30.  Words are power, and power should be invoked in support of the popular will.  That popular will has been manifested in Tahrir, and the armed forces, under General El-Sisi, have appropriately responded to its call.

The examples on the abuse of language as a means to attack the legitimacy of the Second Egyptian Revolution are legion.  Herein below, I shall present the abused language, and follow up by providing the near universal consensual meaning.  The purpose is to pierce the veil of linguistic obfuscation through the presentation of selected examples.

• The sit-ins at several locations in Cairo are a legitimate peaceful exercise of the right to assembly:

Not so.  Your sit-ins in Rabaa and Nahdha and other central locations have proved to be armed guerrilla camps.  You have stored weapons smuggled in to you by your cohorts inside and outside of Egypt, especially by Hamas.  You have besieged the  residences of the peaceful inhabitants of the sit-in areas; broken and entered those homes to use those buildings as lookouts and sniper positions.

You have also set-up tents and vendor locations for the purpose of endless criminal trespass; built up  veritable walls to block access to public streets; committed acts of torture against whomever came within your perimeters with an opposite message; stored materiel for Molotov cocktails for use against the power of the State, including its use of the army and the police; and you have cut down trees and destroyed pavements for use as a stone-throwing weaponry in your armed confrontations with Egypt of June 30.

Your actions have to do neither with the constitutional right to peaceful assembly, nor with the freedom of speech in the new Egypt.  In spite of the language you use, you represent a rebellion against secular Egypt.  Whoever condones using children as human shields, as you have been doing, is committing a war crime. 

• The calls for raising the flag of "Allahu-Akbar" are appropriate for the replacement of the flag of Egypt

Really?  Your pan-Islamism has no real roots in Egypt.  No Islamist flag was ever raised in Tahrir during the January 25, 2011 Revolution whose rightful authors were the youth, both Muslims and Copts.  You came late for that uprising against the secular dictatorship of Mubarak and then, through the ballot box, assumed its leadership.  But leadership to where?  To an Islamic totalitarianism which was thrown out on July 3, 2013.  That was because Morsi had violated his contract with the new Egypt.

And guess what?  Under Islamic jurisprudence, Allahu-Akbar does not mean what you presume it to mean.  You use it as a battle cry.  But from a Sharia perspective it means that all human beings, of whatever faith, are equal before God.  So if you wish to act on the sermon of Sheikh Ahmed Amer in which he said: "The flag of Egypt should be burnt and replaced by a flag proclaiming Allahu Akbar," you shall be proclaiming that you are no longer a part of the Egyptian body politic.

Many of you greeted the seditious call by Ahmed Amer for the destruction of the national flag, by chanting "Allahu Akbar."  You have thus subverted the lofty call for universalism implicit in "Allahu Akbar" for the sordid end of wiping out the identity of Egypt as a State.  If you wish for an Al-Qaeda flag,  you shall not find it in the land of the Nile.  Under your ideology, nationalism and Arabism are not values worthy of your respect.  You have placed pan-Islamism, as a political tool, above all else.  Your downgrading of Arabism and nationalism is intended to deny that those terms afford, among other things, full protection and equality to minorities, including the Copts.

• Those who lost their lives in confrontations with the army and the police, as of the ouster of Morsi, are "martyrs" (shaheed).

We bow our heads in prayer and in grief for them.  They were victims of your manipulation of the term "legitimacy" (Shariyah).   Your leadership pushed those victims to that horrific fate.  But as we all grieve for that senseless human loss, we have to correct your abuse of the definition of "shaheed." 

Islamic law defines "a martyr" as a person who lost his or her life while pursuing the legitimate causes of defending the homeland against outside aggression, and fending for oneself against an attack on person, household or property.  Shahadah (martyrdom) in Islamic jurisprudence is primarily a defensive mechanism.  Thus the shaheeds are those army and police personnel whose lives were lost battling you for the defense of Egypt.

With a heavy heart, we have to note that your supporters lost their lives while threatening and/or aggressing against the security of the Egyptian street and the peace of Egypt which is guaranteed by the armed forces.  Warnings to you to disband and to allow Egypt to recover were, over a six-week period, repeatedly flouted by you.  Those victims, led by you to their tragic fate, were duped by your calls "For Morsi and Islam we sacrifice ourselves."  An ugly means to an autocratic end.

In this regard, you became no different from suicide bombers who mistakenly think that the killing of innocent civilians, whether on 9/11 or on the streets of Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen, is a passport to paradise.  Islam does not condone self-sacrifice.

• Efforts to return Morsi to the presidential palace, through your mutiny against secular Egypt, are your form of worship to be rewarded in the after-life.

This is a canonization of Morsi and his elevation to sainthood.  Your belief in a theocracy on the banks of the Nile magnifies your disconnect with the character, the psyche, and the national identity of Egypt as a State of diversity.  An important reason for the collapse of your Islamist regime is that you have not understood the Egyptian public.

Voting for you in the parliamentary and presidential elections was, to a substantial extent, a vote for relief from 60 years of military rule.  The Brotherhood has never before been tried as a government for Egypt.  Egyptian cabinets before 1952 included ministers and cabinet advisers who were Copts, Armenians, Jews, French, Greeks and British.  A true diversity and a modern cosmopolitanism.  That is why Egypt before 1952 was a story of success, before it gradually descended to the level of pre-disintegration under secular military dictatorship, ushered in by Nasser.

• Solidarity with the aspirations to the creation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza should be pursued, among other measures, through collaboration with Hamas

But Hamas is at war with both the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and with Israel.  Egypt, as a State, voted repeatedly at the UN, for a "Palestine," while Hamas spurned all Egyptian and other mediation efforts for reconciliation with the Abbas regime.  The failure of efforts to forge Palestinian unity has hampered the Palestinian objective of statehood and has in part thwarted all moves towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Yet the Morsi regime cuddled Hamas (the acronym for the Movement of Islamic Resistance) which is looked upon as a Brotherhood affiliate.  In an effort to break the Israeli blockade, Hamas has tunnelled into Sinai for the purpose of smuggling arms, fuel, drugs and food stuffs.  This tunnel invasion also brought into Sinai jihadi elements for the double purpose of waging guerrilla warfare against Israel, and of harassing, together with the Bedouins, Egyptians security personnel.  You seem to forget that the Egypt/Israel peace treaty of 1979, forged under the sponsorship of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, restored Sinai to Egypt.  The Islamist response to that Egyptian achievement was to assassinate the President of Egypt -Anwar Sadat in 1981.

With hit and run war going on in Sinai, an internal Islamist mutiny in Egypt's urban centers, the Egyptian army and police were facing intolerable security threats on two fronts.  Their moves to clear the so-called "peaceful" sit-ins in Cairo as of August 14 could not have been undertaken during the Morsi Islamist regime.  The mutinous Brotherhood declared that the attacks in Sinai and the rebellion in the interior would stop "the instant" Morsi is re-instated -a clear inculpation of the Brotherhood in the Islamization of Egypt at the intolerable cost of sacrificing territorial integrity.

Your support of Palestinian rights, through abetting your proxy, Hamas, was not only an incredible foreign policy contradiction.  It also amounted to high treason against the State (Egypt) to whom Morsi, in his Oath of Office, had pledged to put its interest above all else.  He has violated that Oath.

Your language is not only double talk.  It is transparent linguistic acrobatics intended to lead Egypt to a sordid end.  Islam is a revered faith.  But the Brotherhood is an ideology whose space in this age of globalization and inter-faith communication is shrinking.  Unfortunately, you are far behind the 21st Century.  You may still catch up with the world of today -Renounce violence and stop trading in Islam as if it were a political commodity.  For faith of every stripe, is personal, as Islam itself instructs us.