KHALED M. ABOU EL FADL is a Professor of Law at UCLA and Modern Islamic scholar. He writes in NYT article:

“This time, the military agreed with the protesters. But next time, when protesters call for something that isn’t in the army’s interest, they will meet a very different fate. Today they are called “the people”; tomorrow they will be labeled seditious saboteurs. A year from now, the dreamy youth who celebrated and danced when Mr. Morsi was overthrown may well find themselves in the cell next door to the Brotherhood.”

“No country did more to undermine Mr. Morsi’s government and celebrate its fall than Saudi Arabia. The Saudis understand that the threat that the Egyptian democratic experiment once posed to Saudi autocracy is gone.”

“Democracy is not founded upon the principle of safeguarding the rights of the popular, but upon safeguarding the rights of the most unpopular. What so many Egyptians are forgetting is that the same “public interest” that justified the overthrow and persecution of one political party today will tomorrow justify the repression of anyone who questions the power of Egypt’s army and judiciary.”

“However, while spouting this lofty rhetoric, the army has completely flouted the basic principles of the rule of law. It has arrested members of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Mr. Morsi’s political party for sedition and advocating violence, but conveniently failed to arrest any of the people responsible for burning Brotherhood offices or gunning down Mr. Morsi’s supporters.

Many so-called liberals are praising the military for upholding personal freedoms while blissfully ignoring the fact that one of the army’s first acts was to close down all media that the military, in its infinite wisdom, deemed a danger to public order. This includesAl Jazeera, which saw its office in Cairo shut and its workers threatened and arrested, and their equipment confiscated.

This is nothing new. The army has simply reaffirmed and aggravated a decades-old feud between secularists (who believe that they alone understand democracy) and Islamists (who believe that secularists only believe in democracy when it serves to exclude and marginalize Islamists). Mr. Morsi’s fatal mistake was to believe he could win the trust and loyalty of his defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. Instead, he got a coup.

Secularists across the Middle East have traditionally failed at the ballot box because they lacked support among the pious masses and instead had to rely on the repressive might of the military. Islamists have generally fared well in elections, but because of emotional appeal rather than competence in governing. So secularists have ended up monopolizing power by excluding and repressing Islamists. The predictable result has been radicalization of the Islamists, after they lose trust in the hallowed principles of democracy and human rights”. click link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/opinion/the-perils-of-a-peoples-coup.html?ref=opinion

Posted By F. Sheikh