By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Before you rush to look up the meaning of “Misralogist” in the dictionary, let me clarify that the word is e...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Before you rush to look up the meaning of “Misralogist”
in the dictionary, let me clarify that the word is entirely my coinage. Misra
is the Arabic name for Egypt, and since there is such a thing as Egyptology (defined
as the study of ancient Egyptian cultural, linguistic, political, religious and
archeological artifacts) I thought I should make up “Misralogy” to denote the
study of, or passionate interest in, the politics and religious expressions of
contemporary Egypt. Thus, a “Misralogist” is someone who engages in Misralogy.
There is no logic to this coinage. I merely invoked
it as a jocular term to capture the intense interest Nigerians have shown—and continue
to show— in Egyptian affairs in the wake of the recent military “coup” in the
country. This isn’t altogether misplaced Afghanistanism (a 1940s American
English coinage that means excessive interest in the politics of a faraway
country at the expense of pressing issues at home) since Nigeria and Egypt
share many similarities.
I’ve identified at least five groups of Nigerian Misralogists
that have emerged over the past few days. The opinions of each group are
inflected by thinly disguised preconceived religious, ideological, and
political biases.
First, you have social media-savvy northern Nigerian
Sunni Muslim youth who are angry as hell about events in Egypt. They are
outraged that Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi (a Sunni Muslim democrat) has
been cheated out of political power because of his religious convictions and
wonder if Western notions of democracy and Islam can cohabit. But they probably
wouldn’t care if the victim had been a Western-backed Egyptian Muslim “secularist”
such as Mohamed ElBaradei.
Their angst was complicated by news that the Sheikh
of Al-Azhar mosque, Egypt’s oldest mosque and an important Sunni institution, had
endorsed the “coup” and that the monarchies in Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two bulwarks of Sunni Islam, supported
the overthrow of Morsi.
Nigerian Sunni Muslim Misralogists on Facebook and Twitter were so
angered by this “betrayal” of a Sunni leader in distress that they chose to
label Saudi Arabia “Saudi America” and the United Arab Emirates “United
American Emirates.”
Then you have the relatively small but vocal and
growing community of Nigerian Shiites who were quite beside themselves with excitement
over what they called the praiseworthy abortion of a budding, intolerant Sunni
theocracy. In their social media networks, they gave wide publicity to the
statement credited to Syrian leader Bashar Assad that the overthrow of Morsi
represented the fall of political Islam. "What is happening in Egypt is
the fall of so-called political Islam," Assad was quoted as saying in a Syrian
government-funded newspaper called Al- Thawra. "This is
the fate of anyone in the world who tries to use religion for political or
factional interests."
I didn’t understand why northern Nigerian Shiite
Muslims passionately cheered the overthrow of Morsi and gave wings to Assad’s
statement until I discovered that the Syrian leader is a Shiite Muslim of the
Alawite persuasion.
It turned out
that even before the “coup,” relations between Morsi’s and Assad’s governments
were intensely conflictual. For instance, Assad’s information minister, Omran
al-Zoubi, had called the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood a "terrorist"
organization and a "U.S. tool." Of course, this accusation flies in
the face of new revelations in a July
10 Aljazeera investigative report, which shows
documentary proofs that the US government “quietly funded senior Egyptian
opposition figures who called for [the] toppling of the country's now-deposed
president Mohamed Morsi.”
Well, in matters like this, facts are not allowed to
get in the way of age-old political battles. Shiites regard the Muslim
Brotherhood as one of the most concentrated expressions of the hegemonic
political ambitions of Sunni Islam. In 1982, according to the Huffington Post,
President Assad’s father, Hafiz Assad, brutally suppressed a Muslim Brotherhood
uprising. “The Syrian forces, led by the president's brother and special forces
from their minority Alawite sect, razed much of the city in a three-week air
and ground attack, killing between 10,000 and 20,000 people,” the online paper
said. (The Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is said to be one of the
arrowheads of the current bloody rebellion against Assad.)
This background provides the context for the
adversarial, tit-for-tat rhetorical battles between Assad and Morsi. For
instance, in a
September 26, 2012 address to the UN General Assembly, Morsi
urged Assad to step down as president in order to halt "the catastrophe in
Syria." He even supported foreign intervention to help rebels overthrow
the Syrian government. Assad returned
the favor on July 3 and admonished Morsi to also step down
and hand over power to the “overwhelming majority of the Egyptian people [who]
reject him and are calling on him to go."
Nigerian Muslim Misralogists appear to analyze the
Egyptian political crisis on the basis of this long-standing doctrinal and
political divide.
The third group of Nigerian Misralogists is composed
of secularists (Muslims and Christians alike) who, while professing to cherish
the virtues of democracy, nonetheless exult in the overthrow of Morsi’s
government because they fear that it would have morphed into a violent and
oppressive theocratic autocracy. It was through this group of Misralogists that
I learned that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's creed is: "Allah is our
objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way;
and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations."
For Nigerian secularists and “moderate” Muslims, the
last part of the creed, that is, that “death for the sake of Allah is the
highest of our aspirations,” evokes eerie echoes of Boko Haram’s ideology. I
read people write something like: “I like democracy, but I hate democracy for
terrorists who have vowed to kill in the name of God.”
The fourth group consists of old-guard secular
pro-democracy activists who deplored Morsi’s overthrow for the simple reason
that it represented a rude, undemocratic repudiation of the choice of the
Egyptian people. They drew parallels between the usurpation of Morsi’s
presidential powers and the arbitrary invalidation of Nigeria’s June 12, 1993
presidential election by the General Ibrahim Babangida military regime.
The fifth group is what I call Jonathanian
Misralogists whose sole concern with Egypt’s power tussle is that it should
never serve as an inspiration to overthrow Goodluck Jonathan’s inept
government.
Few events in far-flung corners of Africa have
captured the political imagination of Nigerians as keenly as Egypt’s current
political turbulence has. Is it because what happened in Egypt could
conceivably happen in Nigeria?
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