Between Faith and Fiction

News from the Egyptian Street and Media Translated Without Comment from Arabic into English As a Public Service
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The general wisdom, when teaching law, is that law tends to codify trends and custom of societies which have proceeded such codification by, say, 10 years or more. The lesson therefore is that law follows what people have practiced prior to its enactment.

But in the Egypt which is emerging from the debris of 60 years of military dictatorship of Nasser/Sadat/Mubarak, is applying the above adage in reverse.  The traditional maxim of custom precedes the law has now been re-invented in Egypt to say the law precedes society's reconstruction. The three generations of military/security/dictatorship, swept aside by the January 25, 2011 Revolution, the first to be engineered by everyone and no one at Tahrir Square, confronted the new Egypt with a vacuum - a void.

The void was a gaping hole confronting 90 million Egyptians: No independent political parties; no visible leadership symbols after the so-called Democratic National Party, Mubarak's political instrument, was destroyed; no legitimate Parliament; no free media; no social or economic fairness; no independent judiciary.  The only structure which was left standing after the January 25 hurricane was that of the Muslim Brotherhood, banned form political or civic participation by Nasser since 1954.  And the Brotherhood, also known as "the Banned" (Al-Mahzourah) represented various shades of Islamic faith, a spectrum which included both extremism and liberalism without modernity.  And the new Egypt was bent on secularism in the aftermath of a Revolution during the first phases of which the Brothers played no part.

The ethos of the new Egypt is: "faith is for God; homeland is for all."  It is an ethos that separates faith from the fiction propagated by the likes of Bin Laden that Islam is the propeller of a forever war against non-Muslims.  That was the criminal fiction behind 9/11 and behind the on-going confrontation between Al-Qaeda and global co-existence within diversity which is a pivot of the Muslims' faith.

That historic separation between faith and fiction brought about an interim administration of the military and technocrats to fill the void facing post-Mubarak Egypt.  The interim period is expected to end toward the end of 2011 with a new constitution and legal order in place - law is galloping ahead of Egyptian society to save the Revolution from the vagaries of a slide-back into the unknown.

How does that separation between faith and mischievous fiction operates in the environment of the new Egypt where Friday of July 8 declared: "The Revolution Above All," (Al-Thawrah Awwallan)?

• Retreat by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi newly-minted parties from the slogan of "The Constitution First" to espouse at Tahrir the basic demands of the January 25 Revolution for elections, both Parliamentary (Sept.) and presidential (Nov.) followed by a constituent constitutional assembly followed by a plebiscite for constitutional ratification.  Waiting for that last step would have prolonged the void;
• More than 26 political parties, guided in part by the spirit and content of the Glorious (Al-Azhar) Document (see this blog of June 26) calling for a separation between the State and religion, reached a historic consensus on what they call "the Guide for a Democratic Coalition."
• The cooperation of both the Muslim Brotherhood, now split between a political party and a faith sector, and the Salafis with no less than 3 political parities, was a primary objective of the youth who, through social media, collapsed the Mubarak regime and are now bent upon prosecuting its symbols.
• The Freedom and Justice Party, made up of a sector of the Muslim Brotherhood, has raised the secular flag as a banner around which the new Egypt is coalescing.
• The Friday of July 8, called "Revolution Above All" Friday in which all political parties participated had, beside the goal of unity of all political shades, a message for the Supreme Military Council: "Speed up the trials of Mubarak and his family and his henchmen."  It is a thunderous call for equality before the law, even as the new laws are being drafted.
• Separation between "faith and fiction" has also required the formulation of a new law on the construction of places of worship.  Mubarak has used the sectarian conflict between Muslim and Copt resulting from an unspoken prohibition of new churches construction as a means of prolonging his security and dictatorship State.  The new law was approved as a draft by the Sharaf Cabinet before submitting it to the new Parliament later this year.  Its central features are "no security clearance before construction" and no fake mosques in apartment buildings and cellars, none on arable land, none with a Nile or Nile canals front, and none in antiquities areas.

The hilarious Salafi fiction of the mindless fatwa describing "tourism" as a "anti-Islamic" has been mercilessly interred.  Said the Minister of Tourism, Mounir Fakhry Abdel-Noor, a Copt; "Before the Revolution, Egypt earned $13 billion annually from tourism.  We shall push this figure now to reach $25 billion.  Every Egyptian who loves this country should participate in building a democratic, just and fair State"