When Egyptians took to the streets on 30 June 2013, they weren't just protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood but against all like-minded parties that blend politics with religion. Such parties, most of which are still operational, prey on the religiosity of simple folks to promote their own agenda. Their ideas and aims conflict with everything Egypt is about, and their animosity towards our way of life is no secret. These parties run for office on an agenda of demeaning women, denying minority rights and despising culture. When they made it into parliament, their members refused to stand up during the national anthem and sought to subject our traditions to their interpretation of faith. Nine religious parties were formed following the 25 January 2011 Revolution. They rallied around the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 parliamentary elections and the 2012 presidential elections. And they took to the streets to defy the post-30 June 2013 Revolution order, deploying thousands of members in Rabaa Al-Adawiya and Al-Nahda squares and demanding the return of Mohamed Morsi to power. These same parties are now getting ready to repeat the same feat, fielding candidates for parliament with the intention of using any election gains to blackmail the entire country. This is not only going to get us into another ordeal but is against our constitution, which bans the formation of parties based on religious beliefs. The “No to Religious Parties” campaign, launched a few days ago by activists all over the country, aims to collect signatures in support of a ban on all religious parties. Campaign organisers also call for the elimination of loopholes in current laws that allowed for such parties to be formed in the first place. Religious party leaders are up in arms against the campaign. They say campaign organisers want to exclude them from the political scene, deprive them of their political rights, etc. This is a familiar argument, and a false one. No one is preventing anyone from engaging in politics, but there are rules for the political process. These rules apply to everyone, and one of these rules is to separate mosque and state. Politics is bad for religion, just as religion is bad for politics. Politics involves compromises and negotiations among groups with different interests and ideas, and it falls apart once a group claims to have a divine mandate that trumps all other views. Religious parties, as the Muslim Brotherhood experience has shown, are not interested in democracy and power sharing, but in monopolising power and altering the nature of both society and state. Theirs is not an attempt to have a voice but to silence all other voices. They used the mosques to propagate their archaic agendas and then brought into office a corruption of greater dimensions than the one the 2011 revolution sought to eradicate. Democracy, we must keep in mind, is not about elections alone but about giving the people the right to choose, which is the first thing religious parties want to eliminate. Democracy means a government that keeps its options open and that doesn't undermine the basic cultural traits of the country. But religious parties and their supporters are not interested in diversity, in rotating power or offering a menu of choices to the electorate. Let's not forget that when laws forced these parties to field women on their lists, they didn't even dignify those women candidates by Showing their faces, and instead of photographs used the image of a flower. Are we supposed to elect flowers to office? Are we interested in parties that act as cults, that twist the very ideals of the religion they claim to represent? Those who despise women, mistreat minorities and denounce their opponents as atheists don't deserve to run for office.
