By this weekend, Egypt, though stuttering, would have elected by popular vote a President. It shall be a historic choice not available to the presumably oldest State on earth for 10,000 years. Whether it shall be Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood or Ahmed Shafik who was the last Prime Minister under Mubarak will determine the course of the Arab Spring well beyond Egypt's borders.
The age-old struggle to determine the identity of Egypt, whether Arab (Muslim or Christian), or Islamic, or Mediterranean (secular and African) is back. With more than 10% of Egyptians being Coptic, the adherents of the first Christian Church, the Church of Alexandria, nervous about the new Parliament with 70% of its seats being occupied by adherents of political Islam, the struggle for Egypt's identity is destined to have international connotations.
As of January 25, 2011 when the flame of the Arab Spring jumping from Tunisia, where it started, to Egypt, Tahrir Square in Cairo hoisted a flag where the Crescent and the Cross embraced. But as the Revolution attained its immediate objective, the toppling of Mubarak which occurred on February 11, 2011, the super-organized Muslim Brotherhood stepped in. The Governance void was filled by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF); a group, less tolerant of diversity, called the Salafis, came in from behind; and more than 36 other movements and political parties, mostly secularists, liberal and Nasserite, kept the revolutionary legitimacy alive through occupying Tahrir Square.
The collapse of the old regime, an extension of 60 years of military dictatorship, brought with its two clear and present dangers: a security void, and an economy in a free fall.
Scrambling for a modicum of order, and responding to the demand by millions for a democratic system of government, 70% of 53 million eligible voters cast their ballots in March 2012 for a new bi-cameral Parliament. The two major Islamist parties, the Brotherhood and the Salafis, routed their secular opponents who now hold only 30% of parliamentary seats. Al-Azhar's efforts to moderate that result, through its various declarations for inclusiveness, went largely unheeded.
Looking at the source of legitimacy in the new Egypt, we find multiple and competing sources: for revolutionary legitimacy, we find it in Tahrir Square; for law and order executive governance, we find it in the SCAF; for the people's corporate will, we find it in Parliament; for the interpretation of laws enacted both during and after Mubarak, we find it in the Egyptian judiciary; for a constitutional sanction, we find it, not in a permanent Constitution which is yet to be drafted, but in a patch work of the old Constitution as amended in a plebiscite after January 25, 2011, and promulgated by SCAF.
It is in the temporariness of the constitutional design that we find the stuttering voice of the Egyptian Revolution.
The body charged with drafting Egypt's, basic law is not yet set up. Its prospective 100 membership is supposed to reflect all shades of Egyptian public opinion. The role of Parliament , with its present Islamist majority, in the selection of the constituent assembly is the focus of secularist opposition.
The squabbling political parities were brought together by SCAF with a deadline for agreement on the standards for selection. SCAF issued an ultimatum: if you do not agree on those standards, we shall re-promulgate the 1971 Constitution. Agreement was reached, but when Parliament, with its two chambers convened on June 12, twelve parties defected from the consensus on selection standards.
Why the lack of consensus? The secularists felt that the Islamists in Parliament wanted to shape the constituent assembly in its Islamists image. They declared that their withdrawal was due to the absence of a broad agreement guaranteeing that the new constitution, which shall be voted upon after a new President has been chosen, should be "balanced and expressive of all sectors and colors" of the Egyptian rainbow. Even Dr. Muhammad El-Baradei, the first voice to oppose the Mubarak one-man rule, attacked the method of that selection describing it as "the burial of the Egyptian Revolution."
In the midst of that confusion, Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court added its own dose: a review of the legitimacy of presidential elections in response to a challenge to Shafik being a run-off candidate. This happened only two days before Egypt votes for selecting either Morsi; the Islamist, or Shafik, the Secularist!!
Coupled with the re-imposition of martial law by SCAF, that Court upheld the results of the run-off between those two personalities. Stuttering goes the Egyptian Revolution forward to anoint a President whose constitutional powers are yet to be written.
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