Anyone who believes the differences between the various factions and movements of political Islam are over strategic aims or the basic literature by which they are guided would be wrong. In actual fact, all of them – the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis, Gama’at Islamiya, Wahabbis, Jihadists, Al-Qaeda and Hamas – have a common strategy: the establishment of an Islamic state [the Caliphate] and the replacement of modern constitutions and organic laws by Islamic Sharia. Such differences as do exist between them are over the tactics by which this ultimate objective can best be attained. All the followers of these groups have little respect for constitutional and legal rules that are not based on Sharia. That is why they see a venerable legal entity like the Constitutional Court very differently from the way someone like me, who has studied French law and holds the role and rulings of the Constitutional Court in the highest esteem, regards this institution. Before they attain the stage of what they call ‘empowerment’ they talk of upholding the Constitution and the law but with little real respect and only in the aim of exploiting existing constitutional and legal rules to serve their ‘empowerment’ agenda.
A few days ago, Mohamed Morsi claimed that behind the massive demonstrations held to protest the constitutional declaration he issued on November 22, 2012, was a conspiracy hatched by remnants of the Mubarak regime. He announced that the culprits had been arrested, that they had confessed to being part of the conspiracy and had actually named the sponsors who financed them [he said the confessions would be made public at some future date by the Prosecutor General]. A few days later, the prosecutor charged with holding the detainees Morsi had branded as conspirators released them for lack of evidence, proving that Morsi’s accusations were unfounded, that they were, in fact, pure fabrications. Following the release of the demonstrators that Morsi alleged had carried out the conspiracy, the prosecutor who had signed the release order was demoted, a move that revealed the new ruler of Egypt’s desire for revenge against the man who had dared defy him, not least because this latter revealed that his boss, the new Prosecutor General appointed by Morsi, pressured him not to release the so-called conspirators Morsi claimed were manipulating his opponents.
A study of the history, behaviour and literature of the Muslim Brotherhood over four decades only confirms their inability to grasp – let alone agree with – such notions as the modern state, the separation of powers, the inadmissibility of individuals taking the law into their own hands to seize what they regard as their rights and the existence of medieval entities like the hay’et el amr bel ma’rouf wal nahy’an al monkar [authority for the imposition of righteousness and the prevention of the forbidden]. As far as they are concerned, the state is an entity that should strive to model itself after the state of Medina in the seventh century. Indeed, the followers of political Islam do not understand the concept of citizenship in the contemporary sense of the word. This is borne out by their extensive use of the generic term ‘Umma’ (nation) without defining what it means. When the former Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt said “Egypt be damned!” he was being true to his – and his followers’ – belief that what mattered was the Umma, not Egypt. If Egypt is today divided into two Egypts, this is a reflection of the division of Egyptian society into two societies: one that aspires to belong to a civil state that runs its affairs in accordance with constitutional and legal rules laid down by the best minds in the country; another that dreams of an Egypt forming part of the Islamic Umma, a state constantly looking to the past in search of solutions to all problems. In this state, Sharia law would replace modern constitutions and laws. Most of the country’s educated people and intellectuals rally around the idea of a civil state, while most uneducated, illiterate and simple folk who are more susceptible to indoctrination champion the cause of an Islamist Egypt.
The arrival of the Free Officers to power in Egypt and the eras of the four presidents since – Mohamed Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak – froze an incipient social struggle that is now bound to erupt, a struggle in which the school aspiring to a modern civil state will lock horns with the school striving to create a regressive Islamist state. I believe the forces of civil society will eventually prevail, and that society will come to accept that its affairs will be run in accordance with science and modern management techniques while religion remains a purely personal matter. However, we must recognize that such a development would more easily come about in a Christian society than in a Moslem one, where religion permeates all aspects of life: from the management of society’s affairs to the manner of using the toilet or of drinking water.