Sunday, October 6, 2013

What Happened to Egypt’s Liberals After the Coup?

Click here to access article by Sharif Abdel Kouddous from The Nation. (A late posting because I thought it went very well with the post following this.)

He provides an interesting description of what happened to people on the left--not merely liberals-- in Egypt after Al-Sisi's army took back direct control of the nation. Some embraced the army, some did so temporarily, and some have remained in opposition from the beginning.
The opposition to Morsi began to coalesce in early May, when a group of young organizers launched Tamarod (Arabic for “rebel”), a grassroots initiative founded on a simple yet powerful idea: a petition declaring a vote of no confidence in the president and a call for early presidential elections.
....
“The story of Tamarod is the story of the co-optation of a popular movement,” says Mona El-Ghobashy, an Egyptian professor of political science at Barnard College. “It was this grassroots, fragmented, atomized initiative by definition, and the military saw an excellent opportunity and piggybacked on it....