The passing of Muhammad Mahdi Akef: an ordinary event in Egyptian prisons

Muhammed Mehdi Akif, the former Chairman of the Guidance Council of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, died in Qasr el-Aini Hospital, to which he had been transferred after his health deteriorated in the prison where he was being held. After Sisi's military coup of July 2013, Akif had been arrested regardless of his age, which was over 85, and had been held in prison under the harshest conditions ever since, despite the cancer from which he had been suffering.

Akif, who was 89 when he died, was one of the most reasonable and experienced figures of the Ikhwan movement, which has rejected every kind of violent method and action to date and has managed to keep a persistent distance from violence. In his lifetime he stood out as a reformist personality who came to the head of the Ikhwan movement by election and left it by an election in which he did not stand as a candidate.

Although it lost thousands of its members in the most criminal manner in the bloody military coup of Sisi against the President elected for the first time in the most honest elections in Egyptian history, the Ikhwan knew how to keep its distance from violence. The movement's leader at the time, Muhammed el Bedi, appeared before the crowds even after the most savage massacre of three thousand people took place in Rabia Square and cried out: "Our peaceful struggle, our resistance, is stronger and more effective than their bullets."

In response to this stance of the Ikhwan, the regime's violence, without abating at all, continued systematically with its torture, its massacres and its extrajudicial executions. Despite anti-violence rhetoric that rivals Gandhi's epic struggle of the twenties and thirties, the Ikhwan did not even attract attention among anti-violence, democratic centers. As for Sisi, the coup-plotting dictator who deemed such oppression fitting for them, even if he perhaps enjoys no respect in the world today because of his own flimsiness, the murders he has committed and his corruption record, which has squandered the country's resources, are being overlooked.

In fact, the hypocrisy of the democracy discourse that suddenly flared up all over the world in the 1990s has been laid bare today in all its nakedness, and the theater staged in Egypt has had a very important share in this. The real truth, which began with Egypt but was later proven in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, is that the Westerners do not want democracy in the Islamic world.

Democracy served as a useful discourse only for occupying Iraq. But later, the assessment prevailed that when it was emphasized more than necessary in the Islamic world, it would mean an uncontrollable Islamic world for the Westerners.

Today we see clearly this: the model that the Westerners want to see in power for Islamic countries is dictators such as Sisi, Haftar and Muhammed b. Zayed.

It appears that leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who develop their country, give hope to their people, confirm the thesis that an Islamic country can perfectly well develop and prosper, and rely on the will of their own people, are not much accepted by Western democratic standards.

For them, a weak-charactered dictator who comes to power through a military coup, drags the country into complete chaos and creates hopelessness among his own people seems far more preferable. That is why 15 July, on one hand, also constituted an invaluable test for the Westerners' claims to democracy. Their attitude was not surprising at all. Instead of congratulating the people of Türkiye who protected the democratic values that were meant to be trampled and offering condolences for their martyrs, they showed their true faces by starting, from the very first minute, to voice the victimhood of the coup plotters.

It is obvious that Sisi, who has been in power in Egypt for over 4 years, has dragged the country into complete darkness economically, socially and in terms of human rights. Even so, the fact that he is not criticized as much as Türkiye, which has foiled a military coup, is not a matter to be simply brushed aside.

For over 4 years in Egypt, more than a hundred thousand people have been held arbitrarily in dungeons under torture in the harshest conditions, without being brought before courts. There is no opposition press in the country anyway, and no possibility of there being one. All opposition journalists are either in prison or in exile abroad. The peaceful protests that took place every day in the Rabia squares with the participation of hundreds of thousands of people have been reduced to a minimum by fire opened on the demonstrators and by the arrest and imprisonment of those who persisted.

An Egyptian whom I listened to the other day in Istanbul, two of whose sons are in prison, tells how one of his detained children found a way to get this message to him: "Please, hide somewhere I do not know, because they are making them tell every place I know you could go to, through tortures I cannot endure."

Under these systematic tortures, dozens of the hundred thousand detainees already die every month. Those who die are buried as natural deaths, with forced reports drawn up about them, without any need for investigation and without their bodies even being handed over to their relatives.

Let us not say that he is not criticized at all. These data coincide with what is recorded in the report published last month by Human Rights Watch. There is much more in the report as well.

The elected President Muhammed Morsi has been held since the coup without being allowed to meet either his lawyer or his family. Only recently has he been allowed to meet his family, just twice so far.

Muhammed Mehdi Akif's being slowly dragged to death in prison at the age of 89 must have drawn attention once again to the inhuman conditions in Egypt.

Unfortunately, all of this is taking place in the age we live in, before the eyes and, of course, with the acknowledgment of the world we live in.

As far as it appears, this is also the model that is encouraged and envisaged for the Islamic world these days.

I pray for God's mercy upon Muhammed Mehdi Akif and offer my condolences to his loved ones.