Just as morality consists of the principles of right conduct towards others as individual human beings, politics is made up of the principles of right conduct with respect to society as an amalgamation of human beings. As simple and axiomatic as these definitions may be, it is surprising how commonly these concepts are divorced from one another and regarded as being virtually antithetical, as if politics and morality, like oil and water, did not mix. Yet, both function in the same space of human affairs, namely the management, fostering and care for human welfare. Morality and politics form two different systems, but they merge and interweave in a larger complex in which they function interdependently. If politics is the means to steer the affairs of human communities in the pursuit of what is believed to be the greater good of society, morality is the set of values that guides human behaviour towards the realisation of what is believed to be good and away from what is deemed to be evil. Both politics and morality aim to endow mankind with a vision that gives human lives their purpose, meaning and value. Nothing that people do or think is without some moral valence. This is what being human is about, and this is how it should be. Some experiences suggest that moral behaviour might not always be “profitable”, in the broader sense of the term, and indeed one can imagine cases in which injustice and deceit might serve to realise a beneficial end. Such notions of profitability or usefulness have led some to believe that politics should be approached as if human beings were cunning and malicious by nature and on the premise that might is a prerequisite for the success of political projects. Yet, this utilitarian approach detracts from the value of humanity and from its equilibrium and harmony and its happiness and contentment. It is well known that religious thought precedes moral thought. There can be no morality without religion. While humanitarian morality certainly exists, it lacks the spiritual depth that derives from the core of existence. It is this sense of profundity that human sensibility requires in order to overcome cold utilitarianism in the pursuit of human affairs. In the West, what has been termed “secularist” morality has emerged, which proclaims the independence of morality from the religious domain. However, not only has history not vindicated this idea, but attempts to support the autonomy of the moral sphere have been detrimental both to morality and to humanity. A case in point is Voltaire's paradoxical assertion that altruism is motivated by self-interest. It has been said that morality does not create right conduct, but rather that right conduct creates morality, something that is both true and historically demonstrable. If the moral attributes of good and evil can be placed in the political scales of justice and injustice, it follows that politics and morality are not inseparable and that there must be a comprehensive system that takes morality as emanating from right versus wrong as its starting and end points and of which political behaviour is a component. This brings us to the crucial question of whether there can be a real, permanent and practical connection between political virtues and moral virtues as constituent parts of what we might term a single set of principles, and whether these two sets of virtues can be brought to converge in a single political system. After all, the wisest people make the best rulers, and the ideal state is that which can reconcile political and moral conduct. Perhaps the apparent contradiction between politics and morality can be resolved if we lift ourselves above the framework of the adversarial relationship in which one side seeks to prevail over the other and instead perceive them as being embraced within a single transcendent sphere. In other words, the solution is not to be found among either the “politicians” or the “moralists”, but rather in a single reality that can encompass and possibly transcend both camps. This reality is shaped by the exercise of freedom of choice, which forms the moral underpinnings of responsibility in acknowledgement of the fact that humanity is endowed with a rational and discerning intellect. The chief principle that governs political life in any time and place is freedom, and this is connected with all other freedoms. All political systems must respond to this essential demand — the demand for freedom. No political system can last or remain stable if it does not do so. Attempts to deprive people of their freedoms and to abuse their rights are the prelude to the killing off of their moral structures and of their humanity itself. Such attempts are the first steps towards the destruction of every noble value in the human soul and to the spread of egotism, apathy, cruelty and oppression. Conversely, the establishment of a social contract founded on the principles of consensus, democracy, the rule of law, and the respect for human rights and dignity furnishes an ideal environment for the growth of a healthy relationship between politics and morality. Such a social contract brings politics and morality together within a single overriding order that offers opportunities to advance and that elevates both. The drive to monopolise and perpetuate power in order to serve the interests of a particular segment of society or political group at the expense of and against the wishes of the rest inevitably calls into play the use of oppressive mechanisms and despotic force to impose the will of those in power. The commonly cited claim by those determined to retain an exclusive grip on power — that they are working for the common good — is only the beginning of a machinery of lies and fictions, often manufactured from moral raw materials, that reworks names and rewrites definitions with a view to branding all those who oppose a given regime or the interests of its cliques as evil by definition and sometimes not even worthy of living. Tyranny is pernicious. It distorts moral ideals and humanitarian values in the interests of perpetuating the privileges and promoting the interests of ruling elites. It breeds servility, degradation, duplicity and slander, and it avails itself of any pretext in order to protect its grip on power and fend off threats against it. It asserts its ubiquitous control over people's lives, unrestrained by fears of accountability or punishment, and it renders human life and dignity cheap and easily trodden underfoot. Abdel-Rahman Al-Kawakbi warned of these features of tyranny over a century ago in a text that remains as alive today as it was then. “Despotism makes free with the best and most natural moral inclinations and dispositions and weakens and corrupts them,” he wrote. “It turns moral values upside down, rendering those claiming their rights sinful and those forfeiting theirs dutiful and making the aggrieved complainant a corrupter and the vigilant critic a heretic and the indolent fawner an honest man of virtue. Advice is called meddling, defence of honour aggression, and noble-mindedness recalcitrance.” “Hypocrisy becomes diplomacy, deception becomes astuteness, vulgarity becomes civility, and crudeness becomes gentility. Despotism forces even the best people to become habituated to hypocrisy and sycophancy, while it aids the wicked in carrying out their transgressions as they please, safe from all repercussions including moral censure, since they face no opposition, criticism or risk of exposure.” Politics, in our intellectual heritage, did not initially have the sense that has become familiar today. The root meaning of the word in Arabic is “to steer”, “to guide”, and “to direct”. It is therefore not unusual to find that in many ancient sources the concepts that are applied to politics, such as the “rectification” of the soul, or of the ruler or society, are more akin to “moral” precepts than they are to modern political concepts derived from theories tending to emphasise the pursuit of interests, be they those of the individual, the party or even the nation. This is a powerful indication of the moral foundations of political practice in our civilisation. Unfortunately, there are people who believe that there is no need for morality in politics, or that this need has become obsolete. These people hold that politics is a totally independent discipline, or that it is a system of rules for the organisation and administration of affairs that converges with or deviates from morality depending on the area of the activity and the needs of a given moment. As for morality, understood as a system of human ideals and values, its place is in some utopia and not here on earth. Meanwhile, such people say, those who go back on their word, renege on pledges, or otherwise break moral commitments, must have their reasons, and they are able to produce evidence to support them in this point of view from history and the workings of the human soul. There is an ancient controversy over the connection of virtue to politics, or, put otherwise, over the moral character that confers on political acts the values of probity, goodness and virtue. The Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote of the “virtuous city that exists in the land of mankind”, his response to Plato's ideal city that hovered forever inaccessible above it. Ibn Rushd turned Plato's philosophising on its head. Rather than proceeding from the ideal downwards, so to speak, he approached the question from the ground upwards, proceeding from the intellectually conceivable to the pragmatically feasible and onwards and upwards to the realisation of the “virtuous city on earth”. This great Andalusian thinker thus flung open the doors of the Platonic cul-de-sac, applying Islamic philosophical approaches to the comprehension of such dialectical paradigms as the material versus the metaphysical, the physical versus the spiritual, and the real versus the ideal. He also proclaimed one of the most important humanitarian principles, that of the freedom of the will, which he contextualised to mean the wisdom and discernment that derive from faith, as opposed to the determinism that governs natural phenomena. His philosophy proclaimed that mankind strives to move in the direction that the human intellect at any given time or place discerns as the direction of moral thinking. We should bear in mind that the concept of morality in politics goes beyond the common package of virtues known as honesty, loyalty and courage, essential as these are to proper political behaviour. The question of political integrity also involves the gap between words and deeds, as well as the thorny relationship between political ends and means. No end, however sacred, can be allowed to prevail over the people's rights — the rights of every single individual — to life, liberty and dignity. It would be a grave mistake to free political means from moral criteria in order to justify means purely on the basis of national, class, or factional ends and regardless of how just or legitimate such ends may be. Means and ends are interrelated and mutually contingent spheres. The realisation of a just end requires the most appropriate choice of means that not only best serve those ends but that are also the most consistent with the principles embodied in them. Even pragmatically speaking, inappropriate means distort original purposes and ultimately backfire against and ultimately defeat their advocates. Human experience and history offer endless testimonies of this, as well as of the widespread misery that can be caused in the process. It is not too difficult to integrate ends and means in an interactive process nurtured by an environment shaped by right and virtue. It is equally certain that morality in politics cannot flourish in climates of oppression, extremism and violence, or in the absence of the rights of citizenship, justice, equality and participation. This is why democracy, flawed as it may be, is the only way of establishing the rules of ethical political behaviour as a bulwark against violence, coercion or assassination as means for resolving political disputes. Only the establishment of a social contract on the bedrock of democracy, the rule of law and the respect for human rights can bring about a climate conducive to the development of a healthy relationship between politics and morality within an ethical system that governs them both and, perhaps, transcends them. The logic that says that it takes evil to fight evil and its corollary that says that anything goes as long as it leads to the realisation of necessary ends are quintessentially anti-humanist in tenor, and, indeed, they are against life itself. It is from here that the importance of fighting for morality in politics comes. Our world today offers ample opportunities to compel adversaries to repudiate evil means and to comply with the rules of morality and law, even if it will require new reserves of patience and persistence in order to win the battle for an ethical politics. In conclusion, the following points might be emphasised. First, morality is a broad sphere of discourse common to all religions. Islam, the last of the revealed religions, crowns the divine exhortation to moral perfection. As the Prophetic hadith says, “His commandments state that religion is morality; the stronger one's moral fortitude, the truer one is to the faith; the weaker one's moral fortitude, the more deficient one is in the faith.” Second, attempts to rationalise morality transforms it into abstract rules of behaviour, but the moral impetus is essentially a spiritual one. This confirms the saying that ethics is religion reduced to modes of conduct. Third, any antithesis between morality and interests is illusory and fallacious and alludes only to forms of behaviour coming from greed, avarice, cupidity or aggression. Human experience of morality contradicts this. Fourth, the idea that people will exploit others until stopped by force is negated by the religious tenet that holds that “none are truly pious until they love their brother as they love themselves.” This affirms the moral plenitude that can be seen in human behaviour when people are embraced by faith. It further underscores the fact that the distributions of fate and fortune should be the cause not of sanctioning divisions between people or of allowing the exploitation of some by others but rather for promoting mutual support and encouraging people's need for each other. Fifth, the West has failed to set proper parameters to the relationship between power and freedom and between morality and politics. As a result, behaviour has slipped beyond the bounds of obligation and commitment into the realm of “do as you like” as long as it does not harm others. The Western record with respect to this relationship has been a poor one, and those influenced by Western thinking continue to feed perceptions produced by the West about this relationship. Sixth, separating politics from morality not only leads to violence, but also contributes to weakening the foundations of human community. As the late Algerian writer Malek Bennabi put it, “if science without conscience is the destruction of the soul, politics without morality is the destruction of humanity.” Lastly, the Italian philosopher Machiavelli, whose name has become a byword for the separation of morality and politics, described his book The Prince as “a whim”. In writing it, he said, he had been motivated by the desire to eliminate the evils of princes who had prevented the unification of Italy, and he had used whatever means were at his disposal to bring about their demise. However, he also said that the recourse to the people was a surer guarantee of freedom than the recourse to tyranny and that the loyalty of the people was surer than the loyalty of kings.
The writer is the leader of the Strong Egypt Party.
