In his early 14th century epic poem, “The Divine Comedy”, Dante Alighieri wrote: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” In fact, the vast majority of writers and intellectuals have not remained ideologically or morally neutral on the battle that is raging in Egypt today. They have ranged themselves on one or the other side of the divide, which is to say either with the overwhelming majority of the Egyptian people as manifested on 30 June and 3 July and 26 July, or with that minority that concentrated itself in the now dispersed sit-ins at Rabaa Al-Adaweya and Nahda Square from where it dispatched as many contingents as it could to stage subsidiary marches, create roadblocks, interrupt public services and generate as much havoc as possible in Egypt. Aligned with this latter camp are the terrorists in Sinai who have been unleashing their violence and terror against civilians — mostly Christians, government buildings, the Armed Forces and the police, and any foreigners or tourists bold enough to venture there. Up to here the question seems logical: there is no room for neutrality or for those fence sitters who will end up in the hottest corners of Dante's inferno. The crisis exists and the polarisation is sharper than ever, although it should be borne in mind that this polarisation does not date from the removal of president Mohamed Morsi but rather has been widespread and constant since the overthrow of the 23 July 1952 order in its third edition under president Hosni Mubarak. But what is neither logical nor impartial is the recourse by pro-Rabaa and Nahda intellectuals, writers and pundits to the instruments of liberal culture and democratic thought in their debates with the proponents of the opposing camp. That form of deception might have been understandable in that period before the January 2011 Revolution as a kind of political and ideological cover or as a tactic to curry favour in the West. But to continue to use the camouflage after having come to and exercised power can only be regarded as a form of fraud that merits the lowest place in hell, which is the place best suited for hypocrites and liars. I have discussed this phenomenon previously, in “When the fundamentalist becomes democratic!” (Al-Ahram, 23 April 2007) and similar articles in which I commented on how fundamentalist writers wielded the jargon of civil government, democracy and modernism sometimes as a kind of weapon against the Egyptian government and at other times as a way to gull democratic governments. Of course, they adopted another tone altogether when it came to fundamentalist Islamist governments in Iran, Gaza, Afghanistan, Sudan and, of course, Egypt under Muslim Brotherhood rule. Take a look at what “Islamist” writers are saying today about freedom of expression, the right to protest, and civilian — ie non-military — rule. Look at how they are suddenly defending the civil state, which should not oppose the attacks by the “mujahideen” against Israel. Today they are zealous defenders of the constitution — the 2012 version, of course — while the sieges against the Supreme Constitutional Court in order to prevent it from issuing rulings on the Constituent Assembly and the Shura Council have mysteriously slipped from their memory. More importantly, the constitution they are defending so ardently is the one that lays the foundations not for a civil state but for a theocratic one by means of the provisions providing for Islamic clerical oversight on all legislation and that restricts the frame of reference for Islamic law to Sunni jurisprudence. Thus, the programme that the Muslim Brotherhood designed in 2007 was passed into law in 2012. This constitution was so riddled with flaws that, soon after it was promulgated, the former president announced that he was willing to have it amended. This was a historic precedent and a major part of this precedent had to do with the fact that not only was the constitution seriously flawed, but also the plebiscite to ratify it was flagrantly rigged after the majority of judges boycotted the process of supervising the polls and Muslim Brotherhood personnel officially took charge of the ballot boxes. Two crimes were committed: the constitution that needed to be amended the moment it was promulgated, and the scandalous referendum over it. These crimes occurred in full view of — and with the total cognizance of — the “Islamist” fundamentalist thinkers who, at the time, had no liberal or democratically inspired reservations to register. This should come as no surprise, as their blinkers had remained intact since the Fairmont agreement, last year, that tipped the last round of the presidential elections in Morsi's favour, after which the Muslim Brotherhood reneged on the pledge and commitment to a civil state by instituting an “Islamic frame of reference” that effectively converted the state into a theocracy that was “civil” in name only. And what did the Islamist commentators have to say about the brutal crackdown on protesters in November and December last year that left 84 dead and many others imprisoned and tortured? At that time, the right to peaceful protest did not exist in their book, because “stability” and the “resumption of the wheels of production” was the order of the day, unlike the present, apparently, according to the “liberal” arguments they recently decided to haul out. Nor, in those days, did this coterie of Islamist writers take a moment's pause to criticise Morsi's constitutional declaration, which was unquestionably tyrannical, or the uninterrupted sieges against the Media Production City, or the systematic “legal” intimidation of scores of journalists and political activists that was carried out under the aegis of the former prosecutor-general. In short, the Egyptian civil state was being torn to shreds and the Egyptian people were growing more and more aware of the magnitude of the political deceit and hypocrisy that had been used against them. Worse yet, it was not enough that the utter incompetence of Muslim Brotherhood rule had driven the country to levels of political, economic and social deterioration that, according to all indicators, were far worse than the situation that had prevailed during the pre-25 January Revolution era, which is constantly cursed as an era of relentless destruction, corruption, plundering and fraud. On top of this came the licence that was taken with Egyptian national security, which your fundamentalist thinker is suddenly keen to champion today as long as the perceived threat is Israel rather than terrorists and Hamas. Here the hypocrisy is boundless. Morsi had engineered the truce agreement between Hamas and Israel in accordance with which the former would stop firing missiles into the latter. At the same time, he turned his energies to populating Sinai with every imaginable sort of terrorist, whether those he released from Egyptian jails or those imported from Afghanistan, Pakistan and other outlets of the terrorist industry. It is the welfare of those types that currently compels the “Islamist” thinker to worry about Sinai to which he hadn't given a moment's thought when its northern border was being perforated by tunnels or when that border was stormed by masses of Gazans in January 2008. Today, he appears equally indifferent to the massive arms smuggling operations into Egypt and Sinai from the diverse “Islamist” sects in Libya and Sudan. Such violations of national security are not important to that clique of Islamist pundits who borrow from liberal and patriotic thought and sentiment only when it serves their debating points or the advancement of their political agendas. The removal of the former president was not a “betrayal” of the democratic process, liberal values and the ballot box. That action and the demonstrations that preceded it were to counter the Muslim Brotherhood's betrayal of these values and principles. One would be hard put to find another instance in the history of liberal democracy in which the ruling party — the Freedom and Justice Party — was no more than a façade while actual control over government rested in the hands of a secret organisation — the Muslim Brotherhood — about which little is known on its membership and methods of operation and even less is known about its sources of finance and its international connections with the international Muslim Brotherhood and the invisible threads connecting it with international terrorist organisations. I believe the time has come for the fundamentalist thinker to reveal his true face, so that truth can be sorted from falsehood and so the Egyptian people can better judge right from wrong in the current moral crisis.
