“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Mohamed Morsi
Norman Cousins
Sumera B Reshi
Mohamed Morsi Issa el Ayat, Egypt’s first democratically chosen president died at the age of 67 after collapsing in court during a retrial of charges of espionage with the Palestinian Hamas organization. Morsi played his part in shattering the hopes of the revolution, however, his treatment in a glass cage speaks volumes about the regime that ousted him in 2013. A man who ruined the revolution in 2012 was mourned in 2019 and his death shocked both haters and lovers equally. Nonetheless, Morsi’s sudden death in a courtroom raised eyebrows on the El Sisi regime. Morsi was alleged to have destroyed the hopes of the Egyptians, but the man who ousted and imprisoned him has done even worse.
Years of imprisonment and inadequate medical care and neglect led to his sudden death, but what the UK Parliamentarian, Sir Crispin Blunt calls ‘entirely predictable’ death. Sir Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt was one of the UK parliamentarians who investigated Morsi’s treatment last year, at the request of his family. His finding warned that the conditions in which he was being held might worsen his health and that without urgent medical assistance for his diabetes and liver disease, the damage to his health could be ‘permanent and possibly terminal’ as per the Guardian editorial on 18 June 2019.
As per the Guardian report, some 60, 000 political prisoners are facing unfair trials and cruel treatment in Egypt and Morsi is not an exception. He was kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and denied access to newspapers or television. He met his family thrice in almost six years of detention.
In 2011 a revolution ousted Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president since 1981. The election results in 2012 brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power and new hope for Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi defeated the former prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, a man who had been labelled ‘feloul’, or remnant, of the last and hated the regime, with 51.7 per cent of the vote. Soon after Morsi was declared the winner, he promised that he will maintain Egypt’s 1979 accord with Israel make peace with minority groups (Christians & Shia sect). He maintained the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty and brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, however, he went off the track and tried to impose strict policies on the masses who thought Morsi was hope after years of authoritarian rule.
According to newspaper reports, Egypt didn’t recover economically under Morsi’s one year in office, instead, Egypt was wrecked by power cuts. Analysts say that politically Egypt was fraught. Once he was in power, Morsi tried to impose stubborn Islamist policies.
Instead of repairing Egypt’s economy, Morsi focused on reconstructing constitutional declaration placing himself above judiciary, banned challenges to his decree, laws and decisions. One of the opposition members at his time, Mohamed El Baradei termed Morsi as ‘new pharaoh’.
Morsi’s policies didn’t go well rather his policies brought protestors back into the streets in huge numbers that in July 2013, the army planned a coup, arrested Morsi and fellow Muslim Brothers. When the army was hatching a plan to oust him, Morsi was unawares holding a crisis meeting. He was stripped off from his presidency and was taken to the headquarters of the Republican Guard in eastern Cairo, where many of his supporters were later gunned down by the army.
Egypt went from one authoritarian regime into another. Morsi came into power with people mandate but he tried to impose authoritarian rule without feeling the pulse of the masses. As a result, General Abdel Fatah El Sisi plotted a foolproof coup. Egypt fell from Hosni Mubarak to Morsi and then in the hands of El Sisi which proved far more brutal than Mubarak and Morsi.
Morsi replaced Hussein Tantawi, the army chief-of-staff in August 2012. He stripped the military of its say in drafting the new constitution and in December the Islamist-dominated constituent assembly approved a draft constitution that boosted the role of Islam and restricted freedom of speech and assembly. Protesters were particularly outraged by a constitutional decree that placed Morsi’s decisions beyond judicial review. Although he later cancelled the decree, the damage was already done. He seemed unable to deal with the breakdown of law and order, and turned deaf to critics who feared that the Brotherhood was using its democratic honeymoon to impose an Islamist constitution, in place of the existing, secular ‘deep state’.
Political pundits say that the appointment of seven regional governors from the Brotherhood, and one, for Luxor, from Gamaa Islamiya, the extremist Islamist group responsible for the massacre of tourists in Luxor in 1997 was M. Morsi’s worst decision. After inter-religious killings, the Coptic pope, Tawadros II, accused Morsi of reneging on his promise to protect Christians. By June 2013 Morsi was at loggerheads with Muslim and Christian clerics, the judiciary, the police, the intelligence services and, crucially, the army. Also, Morsi’s tenure was marked by widespread frustration with economic mismanagement and poor governance as per analysts.
An engineer and university professor was short, unimpressive, and lacked charisma. Morsi was a conservative personally and politically. He was in the Muslim Brotherhood’s conservative faction. He was a loyalist, a functionary, and an enforcer. He was not a strategic thinker. Critics believe that he was a man particularly unsuited for the responsibility bestowed upon him. Moreover, he was not a particularly gifted speaker, and his language has the feel and rhythm of a religious sermon more than a straightforward political speech as per newspaper reports.
Morsi graduated with a BA in engineering from Cairo University in 1975 and an MA in metallurgy in 1978. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1979. Morsi lived in the US for several years: he studied for a doctorate at California State University, Northridge, where he was an assistant professor of engineering from 1982 until his return to Egypt in 1985. Two of his five children were born in the United States and hold American citizenship, which briefly became a political issue during the campaign. (This is not illegal, although Egyptian election law does not allow presidential candidates to have held a foreign nationality. It also does not allow their spouses or parents to have held a foreign nationality).
Then he served as head of the materials engineering department of Zagazig University, where he remained a professor until 2010. He was an academic but a not an ace politician. He couldn’t read the pulse of the country nor could he comprehend its needs.
According to the Brookings Institute blog ‘The tragedy of Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi,’ neither Morsi nor his Muslim Brotherhood had interest in power and even objected to the use of the word opposition to describe the group. The November 2010 parliamentary elections were the worst in Egypt reducing Muslim Brotherhood to zero from 88 seats. In June 2012 when Morsi retained power, its excitement led Morsi into a series of mistakes and miscalculations. In the inner circles of Brotherhood, Morsi was incompetent and diverging and alienated everyone outside the Brotherhood. This unequal equation led to his and Muslim Brotherhoods failure. Despite his flaws, he wasn’t a fascist nor was he a modern pharaoh as his opponents claim. But Morsi was more democratic than the current El Sisi regime.
The moment Morsi was ousted El Sisi extensively cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and anyone suspected of supporting the group was considered a terrorist organization. After the arrest, Morsi faced trial on three separate counts of leaking state secrets to Qatar, killing protesters during a sit-in outside the presidential palace, and spying for Hamas.
He received multiple long sentences, including a life sentence for spying for Qatar and a 20-year sentence for killing protesters. A death sentence for charges relating to a mass jailbreak during the revolution was overturned in a retrial in November 2016.
Morsi was subject to retrials in several cases and was sentenced to a further two years in prison and fined two million Egyptian pounds (£83,000) in 2017 for insulting the judiciary.
Many of his supporters met an even worse fate. On 14 August 2013, Egyptian security forces raided two protest encampments that had been set up in Cairo to demand that Morsi be reinstated. At least 1,150 were killed in five separate incidents when Egyptian forces opened fire on protesters, according to Human Rights Watch. The former president, who had a history of ill health including diabetes and liver and kidney disease, was held in solitary confinement in Tora prison in Cairo with no social connections.
Morsi’s death has been condemned in Qatar and Turkey and Iran sent condolences as well. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reacted angrily to news of Morsi’s death. ‘History will never forget those tyrants who led to his death by putting him in jail and threatening him with execution,’ he said in a televised speech. On the contrary, other countries in the Middle East largely ignored Morsi’s death. In this respect, Morsi in death reflects the larger chasm in the Middle East. The Muslim Brotherhood said Morsi’s death was a ‘full-fledged murder’ and called for the mass funeral.
Analysts opine that the Muslim Brotherhood might use Morsi’s death as a catalyst to resurrect his image as a martyr. Only coming months will determine the impact of Morsi’s death on the polity of Egypt.
