President Morsi now has it all: Executive, legislative and ... not judiciary, but something else called "absence of judicial review." It happened on Thursday, Nov. 22, a day when the whole world was grateful for that Gaza cease fire. Morsi, the engineer and the first elected president of Egypt since the birth of ancient Egypt, has, with the US managed to stop, at least for now, the senseless carnage between Gazans and Israelis. During those anxious hours of negotiations, the world looked at Morsi as the voice of reason. President Obama spoke to him at length concluding: that man with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood was indeed a pragmatist. The accolades from all over the world rained on Morsi once the fighting stopped.
Then came Thursday, Nov. 22, a fateful day in Egypt's halting march towards democracy: Morsi promulgating a decree granting himself broad powers. Before that decree was issued, the sign reading "To All Directions" signaled a deadlock in the efforts to draft a new constitution. After the issuance of that decree, the sign reading "To All Other Directions" signaled the unknown.
The dilemma is rooted in the following facts: a split between the Islamists who control the majority of parliamentary seats and the secularists; the haggling in the constituent assembly (the Assembly of 100) over the few yet-to-be-drafted articles of the constitution, resulting in the withdrawal of most of the secularists, including the Copts, from those deliberations (about 25% of the membership); and the fear that the Supreme Constitutional Court, whose judges are hold-over Mubarak appointees, was poised to dissolve that constitutional assembly. Members of that Assembly were chosen by the Islamists-dominated and now dissolved parliament.
Was Morsi correct in issuing that decree? "Correct" is a subjective term which is subject to all kinds of interpretations. Those who support Morsi say: that decree is an emergency enactment of limited duration ending with the plebiscite on a new constitution and the setting up of a new parliament vested with full legislative powers.
Morsi opponents claim that Morsi, using his accolades for his role in the Gaza crisis, is assassinating democracy, tipping the delicate scales in favor of the Islamists in whose ideology his roots run deep, and is anointing himself as the new Pharaoh.
Perhaps the reality is buried under a ton of rhetoric and counter-rhetoric. In spite of that situation, a central fact emerges: the two sides of that schism fear a return to the past leading to an early abortion of the January 25 Revolution. However, each side wants to own that revolution, interpreting its progress on the basis of its ideological perspective.
There is another central fact in the battle of reading the signs at that historic Egyptian crossroads. There is no love lost between Morsi and the Supreme Constitutional Court. That Court had dissolved Parliament, only to have Morsi reconvene it for 20 minutes to have it grant him "temporary" legislative powers. Ancillary to the suspected powers of the Supreme Constitutional Court was the suspicion towards the Public Prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, for failing to win stronger sentences against Mubarak and his associates.
So now, President Morsi, who had returned the army to its barracks, has, through the November 23 decree, freed himself, his decrees and the constituent assembly from judicial oversight. Free at last? Not so fast. The battle between the Islamists and the secularists, signalling an open wound in the Egyptian body politic has begun to intensify. Tahrir Square is again the huge podium from which arguments and counter arguments, as well as rocks, tear gas canisters, and more dangerous projectiles, are exchanged.
In response to those who say that Morsi abhors judicial independence, we find Morsi appointing a new Public Prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim Abdullah, a former leader of the movement for judicial independence under Mubarak.
To those in Egypt who say that Morsi now represents a continuation of the 60 years of dictatorship under which Egypt has suffered, Morsi has addressed his nation on Nov. 23 saying "my actions are for the protection of that revolution."
As the counter-Morsi protesters burned down Muslim Brotherhood offices in Alexandria and elsewhere, in response to the frightening amassing of powers in the hands of one man, Morsi, he responds that he was "the President of all Egyptians."
The masses, while pleased with Morsi's plans to retry Mubarak and his cohorts (against the principles of "res judicata" -the thing has been decided), the opponents still scream that "Morsi wants to make of himself a God."
Al-Sharkawi of Cairo University, an advisor to Morsi says: "This is mainly a political conflict. Egypt needs to move forward. The life of that decree is from 2 to 4 months. Egypt cannot wait anymore. The judiciary did no reflect the will of the people."
For now, I tend to agree. But I was educated in Egypt until the age of 24. There I learnt from my Scottish professors at Zagazig High School in the Province of Sharkiah, a British adage: "Nothing is more permanent that the temporary."
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