When fundamentalists laud democracy, it's time to throw up your hands, writes Abdel-Moneim Said* How many times must it be repeated? We will never see political reform in Egypt until the NDP sheds its Socialist Union legacy and stops seeing democratisation as a protracted drive that has to be taken slow and easy, one tiny step at a time. Nor will we see democracy until the Islamists -- with the officially banned/unofficially accepted Muslim Brotherhood at their head -- stop mixing religion with politics and cease to view the legislative process as a means to promulgate incontrovertible religious decrees. There can be no democracy in the absence of a robust and truly secular liberal trend that knows how to address people, voice their interests and convince them of the value of humanitarian progress. Yet even then it will be necessary for the public to realise that the failure of democracy in Egypt stems not just from the attitudes of the government and the ruling party but from a complex weave of factors. Of these I will stress one: the attitude that democratic rules and standards somehow apply only to others. Until all parties involved understand that political reform is a process that applies as much to themselves as to others, no one deserves a parliamentary seat, be they from the right or from the left. It is perfectly legitimate to criticise the recent constitutional amendments sponsored by the NDP, whether you home in on a couple of articles, such as 88 and 179, or take a more general approach and object to the dangerous and unproductive blending of security and politics. You can ponder, with perfect justification, how the Supreme Constitutional Court will resolve the relationship between the amendments and articles 1, 3 and 5 of the Constitution. A good proportion of reproach can be directed at the NDP, the party that has now riled for several decades. Yet as valid as these criticisms are, they fall short of painting the whole picture. We have to look also at an opposition that uses guns to settle its arguments and thugs to persuade voters and which insists on government intervention in every corner of our public and private lives, from the cradle to the grave. In the same breath this same opposition demands democracy and popular participation. We need to examine how fundamentalist Islamists talk about democracy which, until very recently, they regarded as an import from the degenerate "secular" West, an area yet to be blessed with the gift of divinely-guided rule. Now they sing a different tune. Now, it's look at the elections in Mauritania, the face-off between Bush and the Congress over Iraq, Chirac's expulsion from the Elysée Palace, at what happened to the prime minister in Ukraine... and compare that to what is happening in Egypt. Today's Islamist intellectuals are ready to overlook anything -- Senate Speaker Nancy Pelosky's kowtowing to the Zionist lobby, the finger Washington had in Ukraine's Orange Revolution -- if the comparison doesn't serve to drive home their ultimate message which is that our elected bodies are not doing their job and that everything is rotten in the current state of Egypt. The examples cited above are indeed illustrative of democracy in practice -- of the peaceful rotation of power, of checks and balances between branches of government, of equality under law regardless of ethnic or religious origins (the leading French contender for president is originally of Greek parentage). Sadly, however, this is not the type of order your average Islamist intellectual wants to see in Egypt. When asked whether the notion of citizenship should express the nature of the affiliation between the individual and the state, they'll hem and haw for a bit and then note that the principle of equality is stated right there in the constitution. However, these selfsame Islamists ruled out the possibility of freedom of belief when it came to the Baha'is. Freedom of religion and belief was the last thing on their mind when a group of them concluded a pact with Iran to prohibit Sunni evangelism in predominantly Shia countries and vice versa. For considerations of space only we will leave aside the question of the propriety of a group of politicians, without a mandate, entering into negotiations with a foreign power -- Iran in this case -- and concluding an eight-point agreement, as Sheikh Youssef El-Qaradawi described it. What is relevant here is that not a single democratic principle in the world holds that the ratio of Shia to Sunni in Islamic countries must remain eternal, regardless of the nature of the Arab- Iranian front they want to forge against the US. As long as they have an opportunity to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime Islamist intellectuals are very quick to overlook the fact that democracy, as exemplified by events in Mauritania, France, the US and Ukraine, are a far remove from their own concept of government based on Islam being the solution. It was another matter entirely when, during their deliberations over constitutional amendments, some legislators motioned to revise Article 2 of the Constitution. Then it was not the French, American, Mauritanian or Ukrainian models of democracy the Islamists leaped to defend but the Khomeini and Turabi ones. Those asking for the revision, said the Islamists, were trying to sew sectarian strife. They had the audacity to propose a totally civil form of government in which there could be no doubt that politics is a purely human activity and that people really are capable of ordering their worldly affairs. What we need most desperately are political groups that genuinely believe in democracy, as opposed to sanctimoniously using comparisons with democratic and economic systems they don't believe in and have no intention whatsoever of implementing in Egypt just so they can taint their adversaries and raise a smokescreen around their own plans for theocratic dictatorship. Democracy and economic advancement in Egypt do not require MB parliamentary members to point to the number of tourists in the Emirates as proof that Egypt's tourism policy has failed when everyone knows they despise the way the Emirates has attracted tourists and workers of all nationalities and cultures. Nor should people who aspire to democracy be taken in by the claim that the "Islamic Caliphate" is intended as a framework for representing the cultural, political and economic interests of a particular region, no more than the modern Muslim world's answer to the European Union. It is patently obvious that at every turn in the political road our Islamist intellectual friends will be the first to spout the pieties of cultural specificity, political identity and civilisational autonomy as the rhetorical bulwarks for the universalist mission of covert and overt Islamist groups and movements. It is similarly difficult to countenance the assertion that the full veil constitutes a national dress in the same way as the Indian sari. The two could not be further apart in what they signify in terms of the regard in which women are held, whether as an integral part of national heritage or as a mobile enticement to sin and licentiousness. Nor can the two forms of dress occupy the same ground in a civil society whose proper functioning rests on identifiable individuals. I was among those who welcomed attempts to establish a Muslim Brotherhood political party. I thought that national dialogue had finally succeeded in convincing them to remold themselves into a civil entity along the lines of the Christian democratic parties they sometimes liken themselves to and for which religion is a source of general moral guidance rather than a political platform. Nor was I disturbed by conflicting announcements from various members of the party's leadership; like any political entity that interacts with others there are bound to be divergences of opinion among its members as they confront new situations. But shock and disappointment were soon to follow. They arrived in the form of the MB leadership's announcement that their candidates for the forthcoming Shura Council elections would be running beneath the banner "Islam is the solution". Once again we are to be treated to religious swords in the political arena, to unassailable articles of faith translated into an absolutist dogma of how everyone should live their lives. A country in which politics parades beneath the banner "Islam is the solution" doesn't need democracy. Instead of elections and a parliament it needs a body of muftis hand-picked by a supreme guide and a band of religious law enforcers to beat people into submission to the commands of God as interpreted and decreed by the muftis. People who really want democracy take it as it comes. They do not regard it as a tool to be cynically manipulated towards the realisation of political ends and systems that have much more in common with dictatorship than democracy. * The writer is director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
