From the pharaohs to the present day, no phase in Egyptian history has been without some type of relationship between the state and religion. Religion in Egypt is deeply ingrained in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants, regardless of the details of the creed, the rites of worship and the transition from the ancient religions of Egypt to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Religion has also been insidiously exploited, politically and commercially, and, in the hands of some, it has been turned into a weapon of deception and control, into something that can sow hatred and strife. At the same time, the state, in its various forms and symbolic manifestations, has always had a firmly rooted place in the Egyptian collective consciousness. This is due to its great antiquity, as the first state in human history, its stringent centralism and the functions it has performed over the course of its long history. This historical experience has continued, regardless of the many and momentous changes over the centuries. Indeed, it has reproduced itself in different social contexts up to the contemporary period, and is now characterised by an intense rivalry and conflict between the political authorities and groups that have adopted Islam as an ideology. This has seen the opening of a new chapter. This chapter revolves around issues concerning “the religion of the state” and the “religious state.” These have given rise to various discourses and literatures, events and activities, operational arrangements and devices, and social structures. These ideological and operational phenomena are highly significant, especially with regard to the Egyptian experience. This is not only because of the millennia-old connection between the state and religion, but also because it was in Egypt that there emerged a group — after the rise of the nation state — that deeply entwined religion with politics and turned Islam into a project aimed at gaining political power. This refers, of course, to the Muslim Brotherhood. After decades of striving to reach power by any means, and after incessantly pleading with the public to “give us a chance,” the organisation finally did come to power, only to set a bitter example that will be remembered for decades to come. Such general issues have been shaped by two historical processes, the first of which is the search for a “state religion” and the second is the “theocratic drive.” THE STATE RELIGION: The shortest route to monitoring this evolution, as well as the solidest and most comprehensive, is to track it through successive Egyptian constitutions. The constitution, the basic frame of reference for the state, brings together the general principles pertaining to the organisation and jurisdiction of the public authorities in a formal and stable legal instrument. It therefore offers the best approach to studying everything that pertains to the state, be it religion or other issues. The first constitution was promulgated in Egypt in 1882. It made no mention of Islam as the religion of the state. The following one, in 1923, initiated the reverse trend. Article 149 of this constitution stated: “Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language.” Article 12 stated that “the freedom of belief is absolute,” and the next article stipulated, “The state shall protect the performance of the rites of worship of religions and creeds in accordance with the customs observed in Egypt as long as this does not breach public order or violate public morals.” These provisions were omitted in the 1930 Constitution, which confined itself to the following stipulation: “Egyptians are equal in rights and duties. There shall be no discrimination between them on the basis of ethnic origin, language or faith. They alone shall be entrusted with governmental and civil and military positions.” The 1954 Constitution, never fully applied, included provisions that are highly regarded by legal experts and competent political commentators. In its 95th clause it reinstated the article of the 1923 Constitution that stated that “Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language.” It also reintroduced the provision stating that “the freedom of belief is absolute,” and the following article, “The state shall protect the performance of the rites of worship of religions and creeds in accordance with the customs observed in Egypt as long as this does not breach public order or violate public morals.” Article 48 of this constitution stated that “the family is the basis of society and it is founded on religion, moral rectitude and patriotism. The law guarantees support for the family, the protection of motherhood and childhood, and the provision of the necessary facilities for this.” The 1964 Constitution reiterated the 1923 and 1954 provision that “Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language.” But it was the 1971 Constitution that began to explore ways to take the “religion of the state” further. Article 2 of this constitution read: “Islam is the religion of the state and Arabic is its official language, and the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation.”
But article 40 also provided that “citizens are equal before the law and equal in their rights and public duties. There shall be no discrimination between them on the basis of gender, ethnic origin, language, religion or creed.” The Constitutional Declaration issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) following the 25 January Revolution retained Article 2 of the 1971 Constitution. The 2012 Constitution, the drafting of which was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, took further steps toward expanding on the religion of the state. It retained Article 2 as worded above, and then added another article regarding the religious laws of other faiths. “The principles of the canon laws of Egyptian Christians and Jews shall be the main source of legislation regulating their personal status, their religious affairs and the selection of their spiritual leaders,” it said. Article 10 of this constitution revived the use of religion in the management of the affairs of the state from another angle. It stated that “the family is the basis of society and it is founded on religion, moral rectitude and patriotism. The state and society are committed to the authentic character of the Egyptian family, to its cohesion and stability, and to sustaining and protecting its moral values. This shall be carried out in the manner regulated by law.” This not only delineated a general framework open to diverse interpretations and Islamic juristic exegeses, but it also stated in its fourth article: “Al-Azhar is an independent and comprehensive Islamic authority. It shall have full authority to undertake all its affairs, and it is responsible for the dissemination of the Islamic calling, the religious sciences and the Arabic language in Egypt and the world. “The opinion of Al-Azhar's Council of Senior Scholars shall be sought in matters pertaining to Islamic Sharia. The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar may not be removed from office, and the law shall determine the manner in which he is secluded from among the members of the Council of Senior Scholars. The state guarantees sufficient funds for Al-Azhar to achieve its objectives. All the foregoing shall apply in the manner regulated by law.” The amendments introduced into this constitution after the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood rule abolished this fourth article, which had stirred harsh criticism from intellectuals and non-Islamist forces. However, it retained the second and third articles as worded and provided, in Article 19, that “religious education is a core subject in the public education curricula.” The new constitution also introduced an amendment to prevent the creation of political parties on a religious basis. Article 54 states that “all citizens have the right to form political parties by notification as regulated by law. It is prohibited to practice any political activity or to establish political parties on a religious basis, or based on discrimination due to gender or origin, or to practice any activity that is hostile to the order of society, or that is clandestine, or military or paramilitary in nature. Political parties may not be dissolved except in accordance with a judicial ruling.” However, the application of this article continues to stir up considerable controversy in Egypt. After the court-ordered dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) which the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious society, had dominated entirely, some non-Islamist political forces began to turn their sights on parties created by the Salafist trend. A collection of leftist and liberal individuals and parties inaugurated a campaign called “No to Religious Parties.” The Salafists, however, have denied that their parties are formed on a religious basis or violate any of the provisions of the above-mentioned article. The attempts to determine a religion for the state or to place religion within the general framework that governs political, economic, social, cultural and educational life in Egypt give rise to several observations. First, the process of determining a religion for the state has long been the subject of a political tug of war and constitutes an important aspect of the secularist-religious conflict in Egyptian society, on the one hand, and, on the other, the use of Islam to win legitimacy, to win over religious groups that are politicised or that are striving to reach power, or to use such groups to mobilise the people to support the ruling regime. An instance of the latter occurred when then-President Anwar Al-Sadat tried to use the constitutional article regarding Sharia Law as a source of legislation in order to introduce an amendment allowing the president to serve more than two terms in office; the Muslim Brothers and Salafists were helping him in this at the time. Second, intellectuals and non-Islamist politicians have long argued against the concept of a state religion. Religion is a matter that concerns individuals, whereas states have no religion, they say. States do not go to heaven or hell. They are not brought to account before God Almighty. Anyone who maintains that the state is a legal personality and hence entitled to a religion is deluding himself. They have no proof or logic to sustain this contention, which ultimately is only a means to play on the emotions of the masses and to exploit their faith in order to mobilise them behind some political project or group hungering for power. Third, as a way of alleviating the exploitation of the rubric of “the principles of Sharia Law as a basic source of legislation” by religious groups with political agendas, the state intervened to entrust this provision to the legislators themselves. It was they who would devise the laws that would express and remain consistent with the values, spirit and general concepts of Sharia. The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists sought to circumvent this in their 2012 Constitution, in which they flagrantly attempted to tailor a definition of “the principles of Sharia” to their purposes, saying that “the principles of Sharia Law comprise its overall significance, its foundational and jurisprudential principles, and its approved sources in the schools of the Sunni people and community.” Eventually, popular pressure from non-Islamist quarters forced them to back down and resort to the above-cited fourth constitutional article pertaining to taking the opinion of the Council of Senior Al-Azhar Scholars. Either they were confident that they had sufficient support for their views among the Al-Azhar ulema or they thought they would be able to assert their control over Al-Azhar in the future. The amendments introduced to the 2012 Constitution following the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood rule eliminated the theocratically oriented texts. Fourth, although all of Egypt's constitutions made religion one of the basic frameworks for public policy and stipulated that laws and legislation must be consistent with Islamic Law and enforce all the explicit laws in the Quran (with Islamic forms of punishment substituted by other forms), the Islamists constantly stressed the need to apply Islamic Law. This was one of the main demagogic instruments they used to mobilise the people behind their demands, and against the ruling authorities whom they accused of antagonism to the faith. Before the 25 January Revolution they used such slogans as “Islam is the Solution,” “The Quran is our Constitution,” and “Islam is on its Way.” After the Revolution, they dropped the revolutionary chant of “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice and Human Dignity” and replaced it with “The people want the application of Sharia,” as if this had not been previously applied in Egypt. Fifth, the Islamist groups and organisations have never been particularly concerned about violations of the constitution, especially provisions pertaining to civil liberties and social and economic rights. Their sole obsession is the extent to which the article on Sharia is applied, in spite of the fact that the Islamist groups cannot even agree among themselves on a clear definition of Sharia. THE THEOCRATIC DRIVE: This drive stems from an old perception among Muslim rulers, one that aided in the transformation of Islam into a political ideology, that their mission is not just to administer the worldly affairs of their subjects but also to protect the faith. Although Islamist groups and organisations striving for political power have never openly admitted that their aim is to establish a theocratic state, this is the essence of their political project, as is borne out by some of their literature and much of their rhetoric. The notions of “reviving the caliphate” and the “state of Medina,” the “application of Sharia Law,” “supporting Islam,” “jihad,” “the identification with Islamic universality,” “the Islamisation of knowledge” and the “league of the faithful,” and the elaboration on the political and military roles of the Prophet, even though his mission was the transmission of the revelation not kingship, all reflect a determination to introduce a theocratic Islamic state. The project was expressed in a nutshell in the words of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna, who said that Islam is “a religion and a state, a Quran and a sword.”
On this basis, the Islamist groups and organisations in Egypt, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Arab and Islamic world, contest the state's legitimacy or, more precisely, they do not recognise the legitimacy on which the state is founded. This was the case during the monarchy prior to the July 1952 Revolution, and it remained the case during the post-1952 revolutionary era and then the pre-January 2011 constitutional era, when the constitution was reestablished as a frame of reference, if only formally. The main grievance of these groups was not electoral tampering, constitutional violations or the failure of the state to serve justice. All they cared about was what they called “the non-application of Sharia Law” and “the absence of Islam from the public sphere.” These phrases were their obsession, dominating their political rhetoric and the conduct of their lawmakers in parliament who would use parliamentary oversight, including questions and debates, inquiries and hearings, and votes of no confidence, to introduce and propound the issue. In spite of the constitutional provisions regarding the “religion of the state,” these groups, all of which drink from the same ideological well, mouth a similar rhetoric and practice similar forms of deception. They are all located at some point on a continuum of recourse to diverse forms of political violence and are bent on establishing “the religious state” as an alternative. It was with this objective in mind that they used the first opportunity made available to them by the 25 January Revolution to create religious political parties, however much they may have protested that these were “civil parties” like the others populating the Egyptian political arena. The Islamist groups have differed in their opinions regarding the means to attain their ends. Some subscribe to the violent overthrow of the existing government, towards which end they have clashed militarily with the ruling authorities. Others prefer a more gradual approach based on ruses and deception. A case in point is the Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya, which agreed to a “cessation of violence” and began a process of reconciliation with the state in 1997, only for some of its leaders to revert to violence during the year of Mohamed Morsi's presidency and after the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood rule. As for the Muslim Brotherhood itself, this has swung back and forth several times between violence and deception. From the “proselytising Salafist” trend, some groups and individuals have broken away and taken up arms against the state and society, while others, individuals who refer to themselves as “independent Islamists,” adhere to the belief that ideas and the power of persuasion and education should prevail until there emerges a generation that subscribes to their beliefs. Among the latter contingent, prepared to wait for as long as at takes for the realisation of their objectives, individuals have emerged who have criticised the narrow outlooks of the extremists and blindly obsessed demagogues for their stance on the “religious state.” Prime among these was Selim Al-Awwa, who once said: “In a serious discussion that occurred recently some astute men who were raised in the Muslim Brotherhood, but who left that organisation for broader horizons when they felt their minds and efforts had become too constrained by the Brotherhood's closed organisational mould, told me that the real problem of Muslim Brotherhood political thought resides in its maxim of ‘The Muslim individual, the Muslim family, the Muslim group, the Muslim society, the Muslim state, and global mastery.' “This essentially constitutional saying is repeated innumerable times in the writings, speeches and lectures of Hassan Al-Banna himself. The Muslim Brothers are convinced that they have succeeded in creating that individual, family and group, but they have been unable to find a way to the other three phases of society, the state and the world.” But even this vision of success in creating the “Muslim individual, Muslim family and Muslim group” requires closer inspection. It is certainly questioned by many commentators, who offer counter arguments demonstrating that much of the behaviour and many of the attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood are offensive and inimical to Islam. RELATIONS WITH THE STATE: This drive towards a theocratic state has over time generated various and fluctuating forms of interplay between the state and the politicised religious groups, ranging from alliance, cooperation and coordination to mutual repulsion, rivalry, violence and bloody conflict. The groups would move closer to the state at certain periods when they felt they could advance the Islamisation of the public sphere. But before long they would clash again with the state because it was never enough for them to be just another social and political party alongside leftists, liberals or even the conservatives associated with the regime. Instead, they sought to control the public sphere entirely, and whenever they felt that this aim was out of reach through ruses and stratagems, they turned to weapons. This helps to explain their opportunistic approach to democracy, which they reduce to the ballot box as a means or mechanism to attain power. As for democratic values and culture, including pluralism, the peaceful rotation of power, equal citizenship, consensual politics within the framework of the nation state, and public rights and freedoms, these have remained unresolved in if not alien to Islamist literature and perceptions. There are a number of basic observations that can be made here that apply not only to the Egyptian case but also to the Arab-Islamic world as a whole. The first is that the Islamist groups and organisations see the establishment of the “Islamic state” as a religious duty, the denial of which is a form of heresy that merits death. Their thinking proceeds from ancient writings that hold that the “caliphate” is not just a concept devised by the early Muslims as an institution appropriate to their times, but instead is an authentic Islamic principle. According to this belief, the struggle to reestablish the “caliphate” is essential, even if that struggle descends to the use of excessive violence against other Muslims who are content with the modern nation state. This is especially the case against non-Islamist intellectuals, politicians and groups who see the “caliphate” as a form of imperialist rule of the sort that prevailed in the Middle Ages, a rule that is no longer suitable to the modern world, and who argue that the drive to reestablish it is an attempt to turn back the clock. The second says that the question of the “Islamisation of the state” and the “statisation of Islam” is far from an easy one. Resolving it is not as simple as brokering a disengagement between two states warring over borders, or a settlement between two companies fighting over markets. It is difficult to persuade a large segment of the people of the need to draw a distinct boundary between religion and the state, especially given the prevalence of ideas regarding the first generation of Muslims or the “classical era of Islam,” in which earlier experiences were reformulated to serve the imperial projects of the Ummayid, Abbasid and Ottoman dynasties that incorporated religion into the state and the state into the faith. When contemporary Muslims speak of the Islamic experience, this is the history they envision. They know little of the Western Christian experience and its struggle to separate the church from the state and what motivated it. Unfortunately, this idealisation of the past on the part of some modern Muslims effectively substitutes the experiences of the ancients for the Quran and what it in fact states, requires and ordains. This is because the governments that succeeded one another in Muslim lands never fully surrendered to a total merger, and they always tried to identify or draw some demarcation line between religion and the state on the grounds that “there should be no politics in religion and no religion in politics,” as Al-Sadat once put it. However, these governments were still compelled, in response to the rhetoric and behaviour of the politicised religious groups, to allow religion to blend with the state on some of its fringes, while simultaneously fighting the extremists, hardliners and takfiris who will be satisfied with nothing less than the “religious state.” The third is that the Islamist groups having political projects, beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood that was founded in 1928, and have exerted extensive efforts, shared with some researchers and scholars, to identify the basic features of “the political system in Islam.” This has given rise to the publication of thousands of books oriented directly or indirectly toward this notion, ultimately poisoning the intellectual life of contemporary Muslims. These groups have simultaneously spent a considerable amount of their energies fighting opinions that refute theirs and mercilessly slandering and defaming intellectuals who contradict them. The fourth is that in the formulation of their discourse the groups and organisations having a theocratic project have taken advantage of the failure of the leftist and liberal elites that governed the Arab and Islamic countries in the post-colonial era to firmly establish the foundations of a modern nation state with clearly defined features, strongly grounded legitimacy and widespread public support. One of the Islamists' stock answers to their critics has long been: “The liberals, leftists and nationalists have all ruled and failed, so give us a chance to rule since our project merits support more than theirs.” When the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt, however, people quickly discovered that their notions of the modern civic and democratic state never went beyond superficial jargon and would never be translated into concrete reality. The fifth is that the groups and organisations bent on the establishment of the “religious state” have presented a formidable dilemma to the democratic evolution of Egypt and other Arab and Islamic countries. The chief problem is that these political forces do not sincerely believe in democracy, even if they have pretended otherwise for the sake of dissimulation, or as a stratagem to win support from other political and intellectual forces, especially human rights advocates. At the same time, the existence of these groups in politics and society has furnished the opportunity for successive regimes to use them as bugbears to alarm public opinion at home and governments abroad. This has enabled the introduction of repressive laws and practices on the grounds that this is the only way to stop the extremists and prevent them from hijacking the state. Egypt's recent history, in light of the miserable experience of Muslim Brotherhood rule, has given powerful and fresh impetus to this type of rhetoric.
The writer is a novelist and socio-political researcher.
