Hosni Mubarak has stepped down as president of Egypt, after weeks of protest in Cairo and other cities
The news was greeted with a huge outburst of joy and celebration by thousands in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the heart of the demonstrations.
Mr Mubarak ruled for 30 years, suppressing dissent and protest, and jailing opponents….
Egypt is one of the most influential countries in the Arab world. Personally, I think there is less danger of what happened in Iran happening to Egypt, because the difference is that there is a popular military holding the reins of power as the regime collapses. If they stick to what they have committed themselves to, they could bring the largest democracy in the Arab world into existence.
Hopefully a better model for what will happen in Egypt will be, not Iran, but Turkey, whose military have guaranteed 90 years of secular democracy. Perhaps Iran should remember that the same influences operating in Egypt are those which were behind the Green Revolution so brutally suppressed by the Iranian regime.
However, the neighbors are getting nervous and the Swiss have frozen potential Mubarak assets which some are claiming to total $70 billion; note not million, but billion!
Prayers for Egyptians and that a new peaceful secular democratic future is opening up for them. May they be an example to us all.
http://barnabasfund.org/christians-in-danger-as-egyptian-security-breaks-down.html
I’ve read quite a bit in the last day on how the Army has no incentive to bring in democracy. It has a large stake in the current economy and empowering the emergent middle class would undermine that stake. It’s not over yet.
From what I have been listening to, the army relies on a large US subvension, so presumably the US is in a position to encourage it to keep its promises.
If it doesn’t, I imagine people will be back on the streets.
Prayers for Egypt, Israel, and the Middle East can be found here. We’ll be posting more for a while. I’m concerned about Mubarak’s replacement.
Personally I believe that the radical elements have been using these poor people as a means to get what they want. The people want freedom, the radicals want an Islamic state with Sharia Law. After the euphoria is over, the real leader of the radicals, whoever he is, will come forward and seize power, then Egypt will go from bad to worse. I also believe that this unrest will spread to other Middle Eastern countries, then it will spread to Europe and eventually to the United States.
Don’t get your hopes up about Turkey. For several years ErdoÄŸan has been working hard to islamise the army, to the point it is no longer at all certain they would intervene to maintain Turkey’s secular status.
Don’t get your hopes up about Egypt, either, because the future there will depend largely upon whether it is the army or the Muslim Brotherhood which is more willing to kill its adversaries.
Everything is largely anecdotal at this point, but [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12407793]this article[/url] by Ann Alexander (and the accompanying Reuters photograph) suggest another possible outcome as far as Egypt’s Christians are concerned.
I would have thought it better at this point to pray for the best and prepare for the worst, the best being the Turkish or Indonesian solution (and bear in mind that [url=http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=140&edition=8&ccrpage=37&ccrcountry=173]Freedom House[/url] credit Turkey’s AKP with more progress on civil liberties than one might expect).
The current scene interests me partly because of another, rather surreal scene I watched 6 weeks ago at JFK airport. Having to wait to see the time my flight’s check-in would begin, I had stationed myself opposite an information board, and unintentionally in line-of-sight to where an Egypt-air flight check-in desk was beginning to take passengers’ cargo. I say ‘cargo’ because as I watched one black-robed, heavy and aged-looking Egyptian woman after another, often in pairs, trundled along to approach the queue at this check-in, mostly pushing luggage trolleys piled high with huge stuffed suitcases and large cardboard boxes tied and taped shut. Clearly they had come to metro NY during our Christmas holidays (for after-Christmas sales?) and shopped all over the City or northern NJ. The women were all old in appearance, mostly with only their faces and sometimes swollen ankles showing, and some had such trouble walking they sat down on their luggage the moment the queue stopped. Among this group of nearly indistinguishable women I saw 2 other figures. One was a young Arab-looking woman, completely in Western winter clothing, walking with a few family members, and over her shoulder was slung an enormous transparent garment bag that appeared to contain a wedding dress. I thought she might be an Arab Christian going home to get married. The other figure, who stood a few yards away from me before joining the queue, was an Orthodox Jewish man in perhaps his early 20s, alone, wearing much of the usual men’s gear although not quite like a Lubavitcher. At the time I thought, what an interesting array of cultures just in one flight queue. Today I wonder how Mubarak’s departure is affecting them all.
Ann Alexander’s [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12407793]article[/url] is fascinating, Jeremy. Many prayers for [url=http://anglicanprayer.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/cairo/]love[/url] have been said around the globe. I believe the events she witnessed are an answer to those prayers. If we could maintain that level of prayer support (and fasting and almsgiving) through the transition of the government, I sincerely believe that God would somehow honor those prayers.
[i]The people want freedom, the radicals want an Islamic state with Sharia Law[/i]
Some polling by Pew and Zogby (I believe) published over the last week or so (from polls taken in 2008-2009) would indicate that a vast majority of the [i] people[/i] in fact are very comfortable with Sharia Law in Egypt and the severe penalties it demands for offenses such as apostasy.
Also, if news reports are accurate (I know, a big question there), much of the demonstration fervor was led by younger folks. Time and again, we have seen that what younger folks can possess in fervor often makes up for severe lapses in thinking about “what comes next”.
I hope for a free Egypt, but the situation seems delicate to say the least. And what will the US do? Will we sit on our hands like Carter did with Iran and let the Islamists take it away? Or will we send advisors into the region to coach the nascent democracy toward a stable government much as Reagen did for the Eastern European countries when the Berlin Wall fell?