Syria is the most dramatic moment of the Middle East today, as we await a United States military strike against the ruling Bashar al-Assad regime – but it is not the most consequential political development in the region this week.
That honour would have to go to the attempt by the interim Egypt government to ban the Muslim Brotherhood organisation and its political party. I say this for two reasons, related to both Syria and Egypt.
The first is that a US attack on Syria would be normal operating procedure in light of the past century of Western powers' frequent military forays into the Middle East, usually to whack Arab or Iranian powers that were becoming too strong and independent-minded for the likes of the US, the United Kingdom or Israel. So one more attack against one more Arab military dictatorship would merely confirm and perpetuate a legacy of Western militarism in the Middle East that we have lived with for more than a century.
Second, Egypt matters more than Syria because developments there represent a dramatic new shift in how indigenous forces of power, identity and governance interact.
The two most powerful forces in the society – the military and the Muslim Brotherhood – face off in a direct battle at a seminal moment in modern Arab history when indigenous populations seek to reconfigure their governance and state systems and write constitutions that truly reflect national values.
The confrontation between the armed forces and the Muslim Brotherhood reflects a much older tension in the Middle East that can be traced as far back as the dawn of urban society in the Bronze Age: How do citizens define the balance between the authority of the religious leadership and the role of secular governors who deliver basic services to the citizenry?
Legitimacy of authority among religious and civic figures to ensure societal wellbeing and public order has always been hotly debated and contested in Arab, Persian, Turkish and Asian Islamic societies. Towering forces such as sharia law, the caliphate, the ulama, the armed forces, the civil service, and the business and civic elites continue to compete for primacy in ensuring the wellbeing of the community; that is, in governing.
For more background on this issue, a splendid new book reviews the many legacies and controversies of "statecraft" in Islamic traditions – Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft, edited by Mehrzad Boroujerdi.
Boroujerdi notes that "there is no unitary 'Islamic' position on … issues of statecraft and governance … Islam is a discursive site marked by silences, agreements and animated controversies (not to mention denunciation and persecutions)."
And so, here we are, with new controversies, denunciations and persecutions in Islamic realms, as assorted Islamists square off against each other, the armed forces, secular nationalists and political groups to determine who governs the state and who shapes the national, civil, social and religious nature of the state as defined in the Constitution.
The latest development in Egypt sees the armed forces and allied civil groups that removed the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi from the elected presidency seek to ban the group, both as a political party and as a social nongovernmental organisation.
This week, a panel of Egyptian judges recommended the dissolution of the Brotherhood. This followed a month in which hundreds of Brotherhood members were jailed after hundreds more were killed during street demonstrations. Morsi and 14 other leaders are on trial for inciting violence.
The Brotherhood will soon redefine its strategy for engagement in public life. What is certain is that it will remain a potent force in society and political-public life because of the trends across the Arab world that make people turn to religion when the state fails them.
These include police-state regimes that will destroy their own countries to remain in power, regular foreign military assaults against Arab lands, and massive economic stagnation and poverty across the region.
The continued haemorrhaging of Syria, where two million refugees are abroad and another four million are internally displaced, means that a third of the population has seen their lives shattered. Not surprisingly, Islamist groups of various kinds have mushroomed across Syria to fill the void left by the retreating state.
When the state and its armed forces try to outlaw religious elements in public life at the social-community or national-political levels, we can expect a robust clash between the two greatest forces that have contested public authority, national identity and civil order in the Middle East for roughly the past 5000 years – deities and defence ministers.
The outcome of this battle will be remembered long after US President Barack Obama and Assad have left the scene. – © 2013 Rami G Khouri, with permission from Agence Global
Rami G Khouri is editor-at-large of the Daily Star, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Follow him @ramikhouri