Agony continues with new gov’t resignations
Violence escalates in streets
CAIRO — Tensions in the Egyptian capital reached new heights Wednesday after three of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s aides quit because they believe he has botched the promotion of a draft constitution that had been designed to enhance Islam’s role in government and because of a presidential decree that Morsi issued giving him sweeping powers.
The constitution that Morsi proposed last week has triggered unrest that reached a new peak Wednesday with bloody street battles that raged into the night between secularists seeking to diminish the influence of Islam in the document and much more numerous supporters of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Discontent within Morsi’s inner circle over the draft constitution and the likelihood of serious mayhem in Cairo because of it has encouraged the secularists — a hodgepodge of liberals, leftwingers, Coptic Christians and some supporters of the old, disgraced military regime — to call this the “decisive battle” in the struggle for Egypt’s political future.
But it is hard to see how the secularists can win their demands for a constitution that is not salted with ambiguous references to Islam’s role in Egypt such as the current proposal is. No matter how much noise the opposition makes — and it has been making a lot of noise — the best that the op- position can probably hope for is a slightly watered down version of the document that the conservative Brotherhood- dominated constitutional assembly came up with and which Egyptians will accept or reject in a snap referendum that was called last week for Dec. 15.
The truth is that hopes for a secular Egypt were doomed the moment the Muslim Brotherhood chose nearly two years ago to participate in the formal political process. The culprit was democracy.
As hard as it is for secular Egyptians and their western backers to swallow, there are more Egyptians who want Qur’anic scholars to advise the justice system, favour the introduction of Shariah law and demand a formal role for Islam in everyday life than there are Egyptians who are repelled by such theocratic thinking.
Democracy sometimes throws up governments that a substantial minority of the citizenry loathe. Speaking mostly to each other, the secularists convinced themselves that the Brotherhood could be defeated at the polls last winter. They are indulging in the same kind of wishful thinking over the constitution now. But wishing something is true does not always make it so.
Remember when all those secularists were interviewed again and again by excited western news anchors last winter. We admired their idealism, their heroism and their commitment to democracy and values similar to our own. The only problem was that a majority of Egyptians who were not so articulate in English and not so western-oriented and therefore not so comforting to a western audience had very different ideas about the future of their country.