By Mona Anis Last Friday saw an unprecedented display of strength by the most conservative forces of political Islam, the Salafists. This no doubt has many implications, but its implications must be read in the context of the limitations of other political forces competing in Egypt now. On 28 July, the chant "Islamic, Islamic, neither Eastern nor Western" jolted a great number of liberal and socialist Egyptians out of a prolonged slumber. With tens of thousands straining their lungs in unison, the sound was deafening. In the week leading up to Friday, liberals and socialists had sought to negotiate some kind of consensus on the slogans and demands to be expressed on that day with representatives of different Islamist groups. They wanted to unify the ideas promoted on various podiums, including the largest -- the one run by the Muslim Brotherhood. As Salafists from different parts of the country poured into Tahrir Square from the early hours of Friday morning waving the black and green flags of Jihad and Wahhabism, respectively, as placards demanding the application of Sharia began dominating the picture, it was patently clear that a week's worth of negotiations had come to nothing. Dr Amr Hamzawi, a liberal political scientist and a participant in the negotiations, wrote in his daily column in Shorouk newspaper: "What happened in Tahrir Square has demonstrated the limited ability of the Islamists to build a societal consensus and to abide by the agreement reached between them and other [political] national forces." Hamzawi, who has been advocating consensual politics and warning against polar positions for the past few weeks, has obviously changed his mind, arguing that "We are back to square one: polarisation between advocates of the religious state and advocates of the civil state, with the former claiming to monopolise religion, accusing the latter, wrongly, of being sacrilegious and wanting to exclude religion." Thus his final advice was that all the political forces previously engaged in forming electoral alliances with the Islamists should pull out of such alliances and form a "National Front" to defend the civil state. The problem with this argument is that the very concept of the civil state is nebulous. It is often used as a euphemism for secularism or separation of church from state, but we live in the 21st century, and we have not been ruled by church or mosque since the beginning of the 19th. As for the claim that "civil forces", whoever those may be, don't want to exclude religion from politics, what is it they do want, then? Disheartening to see that the Islamists are more rigorous in their terminology than their adversaries, the beneficiaries of modern western education. In their attempt not to anatagonise a conservative majority, secularists try to avoid so calling themselves, hiding instead behind such terms as "civil forces," advocating a "civil state" and a "civil society" without endeavouring to define such terms. In his groundbreaking essay State and Civil Society: observations on certain aspects of the structure of political parties in periods of organic crisis, collected in Prison Notebooks (written in prison between 1929-1935), the Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci writes, "At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic 'men of destiny'. " As is well known, Gramsci was imprisoned by Mussolini, who in 1926, following an attempt on his life, decided to end any semblance of bourgeois democracy in Italy. Gramsci was arrested in 1928 and given a 20-year sentence: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning," declared the Italian Public Prosecutor in Gramsci's trial. As his health deteriorated, he was moved to hospital in the summer of 1935, and he died on 27 April 1937. But throughout his prison years, Gramsci worked incessantly on refining concepts we have continued to discuss to the present day, especially those pertaining to the exceptional state, with fascism being an example. In the aforementioned essay, Gramsci scrutinises many of the concepts we keep churning up, two particularly obvious ones being those of civil society and hegemony. According to Gramsci, civil society is not the opposite of religious society, but rather the framework through which social classes can resist the state in its wars for a position before the frontal war: "A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power)". Hence, the exclusion of social forces adopting religious ideology from the civil struggle is erroneous, as civil is not the opposite of religious -- if anything, it is indeed the opposite of military. The opposite of religious ideology is secular ideology, and secularists should have the courage to call themselves by that name. Our parents and grandparents had the audacity to call a spade a spade. Without polarisation on all fronts, theoretical or otherwise, we will keep running around in circles, always ending back in square one.
