Within two years of the so-called Arab Spring, the Arab world’s most populous and significant country from the standpoint of the political and cultural influence it casts on the region, Egypt, is seething again. Mohamed Morsi, the leader of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood party, gained ascendance by defeating his secular opponents in a fair election after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. But after appearing to win over the military — which had repressed political Islam for 60 years — following an intense six-month courtship, Mr Morsi is in the process of making a serious effort to introduce an Islamist Constitution through a referendum next Saturday that downplays individual rights and freedoms. It also seeks to give undue powers to the military by safeguarding its autonomy, not unlike the Mubarak era.
The backlash from liberal and secular opinion has been instantaneous. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have held protest marches. Violent demonstrators have attacked Muslim Brotherhood offices, including its headquarters, and state institutions. The military has been handed powers to deal with the situation. The country is on edge, belying expectations, especially in Washington and other Western capitals, that the emergence of the party of political Islam through the ballot will be a factor for stability in Egypt and across West Asia and North Africa. The opposite is turning out to be the case, raising questions over the very notion of the Arab Spring through which secular but authoritarian, or military-backed, rulers in many Arab countries were toppled through a civil war-like build-up with the conspicuous support of the United States. Some oil-rich Gulf Arab countries have sounded a warning about relying on political Islam to offer stability that will calm the volatile region. An influential UAE official spoke to the international media openly about this hardly a fortnight ago in Abu Dhabi.
In the first flush of the Arab Spring, Western-backed political action accounted for authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. War, fought with heavy weapons, has been raging on the streets of Syria for the past two years. In a replay of what happened in the other three countries, the objective is to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which has not proved a pushover. Even the US now appears worried that Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda group doing the heaviest fighting in Syria, is gaining influence among the fighting brigades backed by the West.
With political heat rising to boiling point in the Arab zone, geo-economic and geo-political considerations are on the verge of becoming unpredictable, raising questions about international energy prices and America’s role as a potential stabiliser. The UN Security Council needs to play a more deliberative and decisive role with a sense of urgency to retrieve the situation across the region.