Political Islam is the doctrine and/or movement that contends that Islam possesses a theory of politics and the state. The theory, however, is a modern improvisation that only started to emerge after the First World War. Nazih Ayubi, a professor of Islamic studies, elaborates by saying that “the impression that such a theory exists is usually reinforced by the fact that contemporary Islamists repeatedly invoke religious and juridical texts, as well as certain historical precedents of ‘Islamic government,' in their attempt to prove the ‘obligatoriness' of an Islamic State.” In his and others' studies, however, very little on matters of government and the state has been found in Islamic sources, even in the Quran itself. Furthermore, “the first issue to confront the Muslim community immediately after the death of the Prophet Mohammed was the problem of government, and Muslims had therefore to innovate and improvise with regard to the form and nature of government,” Ayubi writes. Theorising about politics was very much delayed, and with the passage of time subsequent generations elevated the elegant body of Islamic jurisprudence, formulated by the early jurists, to the level of the Sharia, or religious law. The point that should be highlighted here is that this jurisprudence has now been taken out of its historical and political context and endowed with essentialist and everlasting qualities. As religion in the Arab Middle East has a strong grip on societies confronted by a myriad of socio-political challenges, Islamist groups have found fertile terrain among a disenchanted populace, where, as a result of political opposition to various governments, they have been able to recruit large numbers of members through religious indoctrination. Rulers, on the other hand, have used religion to win over the masses and acquire legitimacy. Hence, Islam has been manipulated in the struggle for power. Egypt, for example, has been the stage of this struggle between its rulers and the Muslim Brotherhood for the past 80 years, and the Brotherhood, the first regional Islamist organisation, has become a world organisation operating in 70 countries. As the struggle continued from the period of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser to that of former president Hosni Mubarak, the public political space was nearly emptied of all liberal democratic and leftist political parties. This opened the door to let the Muslim Brotherhood occupy the vacuum. Needless to say, at the beginning of the present transition period and prior to the holding of parliamentary elections in 2011, there seemed to have been some kind of mutual understanding and degree of cooperation between the Muslim Brotherhood and the liberals in Egypt. The Brotherhood insisted on running in the legislative elections before drafting a new constitution that would be based on national consensus and not on partisan considerations. However, they then, along with the other Islamist parties, formed a united front, pretentiously operating under the banner of implementing God's law, that turned the political process into a religious competition, if not a struggle, between “the believers in God's rule and secular infidels.” Following its taking control of the executive and legislative powers, the Islamist front continued its attacks on the judiciary in Egypt up to its highest echelon, the Supreme Constitutional Court, which was paralysed by ousted former president Mohamed Morsi's unconstitutional “presidential declaration” of late last year. Amid a chaotic political atmosphere, a nefarious new Islamist constitution was then swiftly endorsed by the president At that point, Egyptians started to realise that their country's identity and the pillars of their nation were in imminent danger. All this happened as the newly elected president and his ruling party and clan were becoming increasingly out of touch with the ailing economy and the societal divides caused by his acts. At this point, the historic moment of June 30, 2013, came, which Egyptians rightly consider to be a corrective move to the hijacked 25 January Revolution. However, elements in the western media and in Arab satellite TV channels then launched a campaign of fallacies and twisted news stories that do not reflect the facts on the ground and the will of the millions who took to the streets of Egypt on that day in order to correct the course of their peaceful revolution. Unfortunately, some Western countries seem to have been fooled by their own media or misguided by the short-sighted analyses of their own advisers. They have not understood the true issues and challenges that Egypt is facing, hindering the legitimate aspirations of her people to build a modern state in which all citizens are equal. The misguided allegations of some western states were based on what they considered to be a “coup”, though this was in fact the orderly backing of the national defence forces with the aim of protecting the people and their revolution against an autocratic fascist regime and an unqualified president who had lost his legitimacy due to acts that had brought the country to the brink of economic collapse and near civil war. What happened on June 30 and the days that followed, as repeatedly expressed by the Egyptian people and the new government in charge of the execution of the current roadmap, will lead to a period of hard work to lay the foundations of the new Egypt, guided by a new democratic constitution written by all Egyptians for all Egyptians. There can be no retreat to the dark ages and no experiments with untested political theories in order to establish a farcical kind of democracy in Egypt. There is no time to waste on such futile activities. Egyptians who took to the streets on June 30 know that Egypt is part of the contemporary world. They believe that real democracy is the solution to the challenges that face any country in today's world and particularly in their own. The events of the last few weeks in particular have confirmed Egyptians' understanding of the sources of extremism and terrorism: the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots up to Al-Qaeda. This fact has been unequivocally declared by Egypt's leaders, government representatives, and Ahmed Al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar. “Islam must open up, shed its self-imposed isolation, and stop treating the followers of other religions as enemies who must either be eliminated or drawn into the fold of Islam. Al-Azhar will continue to be a bastion for tolerance and moderation against extremism and fanaticism,” Al-Tayeb has said. Evidence of terrorism for the first time in Egypt's modern history is now abundant across the country, from Sinai in the north to Aswan in the south. However, this has not worked in any part of the Middle East after what was supposed to be the Arab Spring. On the contrary, its proponents have spread havoc in various countries of the region, and in the rest of the world, though some have seemed to forget this. Egyptians and millions of Arabs who love life and peace and reject all forms of racism, extremism and terrorism know that the true spirit of the Abrahamic religions is to liberate the human spirit. They cannot and should not accept any kind of theocratic, autocratic or fascist rule, which would be to misuse one of the great world religions to suppress or oppress people in order to achieve political ends. Will Egyptians again surprise the world and prove that they will now resume the role of their great ancestors by building a civilised new Egypt? Will they prove to a troubled world that political Islam has now fallen once and for all on the banks of the Nile?
The writer is president of the Canadian Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights.
