Thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many wearing hard hats and armed with makeshift clubs, are camped near the presidential palace in anticipation of a battle to defend their ally, President Mohamed Morsi. In three days of protests against him around the Nile Delta, gunmen have killed at least five Brotherhood members and set fire to several of its offices.
Egyptians protested against President Mohamed Morsi in Cairo on Saturday. A Muslim cleric has warned of “civil war.”
The use of firearms is becoming more common on all sides. Activists who once chanted, “Peaceful, peaceful,” now joke darkly about the inevitability of violence: “Peaceful is dead.”
With a new wave of protests scheduled for Sunday, Egypt’s pre-eminent Muslim religious authority, Al Azhar, warned in a statement this weekend of potential “civil war.”
A year after Egypt’s first credible presidential election, the ballot box has failed to deliver on promises of unquestioned legitimacy or the nonviolent resolution of political disputes. In more than two years of postrevolutionary crises, the streets have never felt so tense.
Mismanagement or sabotage by the institutions of the old government has stunted the transition to democracy. Egypt’s new Islamist leaders all but gave up on building support beyond their faction. And now long-suppressed conflicts over questions of national identity or entrenched interests are threatening to tear apart the national cohesion that was a hallmark of the 18-day uprising in 2011 against President Hosni Mubarak. The strife is beginning to challenge the historic sense of nationhood that long distinguished Egypt from volatile neighbors whose borders were carved out by colonial powers.
“It is gone — that unity is gone completely,” said Islam Lotfy, a former youth leader of the Brotherhood who helped lead the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. He no longer knows what side to stand on in the protests on Sunday, he said, because as a governing party the Brotherhood has turned out to be “a bunch of losers” while the opposition in the streets now includes too many elements of the former autocracy, “the people who killed my friends and who tried to kill me.”
President Obama, on a visit to Johannesburg, said the administration was working to ensure the safety of United States Embassy and consulate staff, and he urged all sides to denounce violence. “We do not take sides in terms of who should be elected by the Egyptian people,” Mr. Obama said. “We do take sides in terms of observing a process for democracy and the rule of law.”
Some of the discord is inside the government, which Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood are still struggling to control. The Interior Ministry, in charge of Mr. Mubarak’s feared security forces, is still largely intact since his ouster, and the police are in more or less open revolt. At a recent meeting of the main police officers’ association to discuss the planned protests, one policeman recalled their “betrayal” by the collapse of the Mubarak government and called their current diminished status “a catastrophe.” Alluding to Mr. Morsi’s time in jail for his Islamist politics, the officer denounced “people who were in prison and are now presidents,” and he said that if even a single officer went to protect a Brotherhood office on Sunday, “I swear to God almighty, he will be shot.”
Gen. Salah Zeyada, a senior Interior Ministry official on the association’s board, reassured him. “We all agree, brothers, that there will be no security provided for headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.
The police association made no secret of its disaffection: it posted a video clip of the exchange on its Facebook page, and activists opposed to the Brotherhood have cited it as encouragement.
Iconic faces of the Mubarak government have emerged to fan the flames. Hussein Kamel, the right hand of the former spy chief Omar Suleiman, stood behind Mr. Suleiman when he was forced to hand over power on Mr. Mubarak’s behalf. On Tuesday, Mr. Kamel held a news conference to allege nefarious intrigue by the Brotherhood and urge the public to demonstrate on Sunday for Mr. Morsi’s ouster. “We will consider it a referendum,” he declared, to show “the utter failure for the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The military, which ruled Egypt for more than a year after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster, retains substantial autonomy under the new Constitution, and the generals have been conspicuously coy about the strength of their allegiance to Mr. Morsi. Last week the military issued a cryptic statement urging all sides to reconcile, pledging to step into politics if needed to protect the nation and making no reference to Mr. Morsi.
To some Brotherhood opponents, “the army seemed to be saying, ‘We will intervene if the violence gets out of hand,’ so there is almost an incentive to do it,” said Nathan J. Brown, a political scientist at George Washington University who was in Egypt at the time.
During a presidential address last week, Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, the defense minister, sat stone-faced, even as Mr. Morsi saluted the “men of gold” in the Egyptian armed forces. And leftist opposition leaders have come close to overtly welcoming a form of military coup. Hamdeen Sabahi, a former leftist presidential candidate, recently described plans for a post-Morsi government.
“What’s proposed is for the Egyptian people with the help of its military and judiciary to create a formula that would manage this transition,” he said.
“Did you see how Morsi was flirting with the military in his speech today?” Mr. Sabahi added. “A flirtation coming from lack of confidence.”
Brotherhood officials and Morsi advisers contend that those who gained profit or position under the Mubarak government are stirring up the discord. They lay special blame on the courts, packed with judges appointed under Mr. Mubarak and as a group openly hostile to the Islamists.
The courts last year authorized the military to take over Egypt’s Islamist-led Parliament in an unusually rushed decision on the eve of Mr. Morsi’s election, and in recent months they have repeatedly blocked the passage of laws to elect a new one.
“The biggest centerpiece of our democratic institutions is missing: the Parliament,” said Gehad el-Haddad, a senior Brotherhood official, arguing that the legislature would give all factions a means to hold the president accountable or even impeach him without street violence. “It is because of the missing piece that we are in such chaos.”
Mr. Morsi’s opponents argue that the slide toward chaos began last fall with his fiat suspension of the authority of the courts until the passage of a constitution. He said he was seeking to prevent the courts from dissolving the constitutional assembly, too. But the result was a rushed referendum on an Islamist-backed charter that firmly convinced his opponents of the Brotherhood’s intent to shut them out and monopolize power.
“We are in a new, theocratic dictatorship,” declared Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers of the revolt against Mr. Mubarak and now of the protests against Mr. Morsi. He argued that waiting for a new parliamentary election expected this fall would risk allowing Mr. Morsi to advance an Islamist agenda “on the Iranian example.”
“People are getting ready to defend themselves because they know that the Islamists, well, most of them are basically terrorists,” Mr. Ghazaly Harb said. “Molotov cocktails or whatever, but people have to have a way to protect themselves.”
Analysts note that the current political debate includes almost no criticism of any specific Morsi policies or articulation of alternatives. Instead, the demand to remove Mr. Morsi is driven by fears among opposition groups of the Brotherhood’s future Islamist agenda, worries among old government and business elites about their potential displacement, and the inchoate anger of much of the population at the fuel shortages and economic pain brought on by two years of political strife.
“The agenda is not about health reform or how to build an Egyptian Harvard or Yale,” said Moataz Abdel Fattah, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. “It is just a competition over who should preside and set the rules.”
Only one major party, the ultraconservative Islamists of Al Nour, has criticized both Mr. Morsi and his enemies for failing to settle on a unity government until parliamentary elections. “The idea that there must be two groups and two parties and conflicts and killing in the street and the shedding of blood and then one party emerges as victorious — this victory will only be over the corpse of the country,” said Basam al-Zarqa, a vice president of the Nour party who resigned as a Morsi adviser.