The failure of liberals to fight the electoral battle continues to create strife between them and Islamists who did and won, writes Abdel-Moneim Said After the outbreak of the "Arab Spring", Arab political and intellectual elites split into three distinct trends. One subscribes to the Islamist creed that surged to victory in the countries of the Arab Spring and that is poised to repeat the experience in other countries. The second consists of liberals and secularists, including the Arab nationalist movement among others. These not only supported the Arab revolutions from the outset, but they occasionally outbid them in radical fervour as they scrambled to position themselves in the vanguard. The third is the conservatives who, by definition, fear radical change and prefer long and gradual reform in the political domain. The Arab Spring placed conservatives a quandary. They were uncertain who to be on guard against: the revolutionaries with their passion for totally overhauling the system, or the Islamists who are prone to dangerous fits of radicalism. In the countries of the Arab Spring, the public split between the first two trends. In Tunisia and Egypt, the ratios were almost the same, with the Islamists, in their diverse shades, securing around 77 per cent of the vote from the politically active public that turns out for the polls and that is ready to take to the street, if necessary, to take part in "million man" marches. The remaining 23 per cent rallied behind the liberals, secularists or nationalists, which is to say the non-Islamist camp in which one does not hear such slogans as "Islam is the solution" or such terms as "Islamic frame-of-reference" and in which hopes are pinned on a modern civil and democratic state. How this split came about and what will be its immediate and long-term consequences is a subject that requires intensive study. However, as a starting point it is important to note that the declared "ideological" differences between the two is no longer that great, or at least not as large as some imagine. Leaders of the religious trend have repeatedly said that they want a civil state. Islamic history has known only the civil state -- or so they say. As long as the government is not run by clergymen, they argue, the state is necessarily a civil one. How valid this argument is will not be our concern here. Rather, our point is that the religious trend has taken on board the concept of the civil state and, moreover, insists that it is its foremost champion. On the other side of the divide, liberals and secularists have conceded on the question of Article 2 of the constitution, which states that Islam is the religion of the state and that the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation. This is a big step back from the position of the left at the time when constitutional amendments came under debate following the 2005 elections. At that point, 100 Egyptian intellectuals signed a statement calling either for the abolition of Article 2 or that it be at least reworded to read "the higher purposes" of Islamic Sharia. Today, there is no longer a problem over this article; all parties have accepted its current wording. In addition, what is now referred to as the Al-Azhar Document, and the subsequent Democratic Alliance Document, which brought together both religious and civil parties, has come to form a sizeable common ground on Egypt's forthcoming constitution, residual differences being largely questions of detail. But if this is the case, what is the problem? What is this division between the two major camps in the Arab Spring countries about? In Egypt, the most recent altercation may shed light on that question. This dispute, which became quite acrimonious, concerned the creation of the assembly that will be responsible for drafting the nation's new constitution. The Constitutional Declaration of March 2011, which was meant to serve as a roadmap for the interim period, assigned this task to the People's Assembly and the Shura Council. The first bone of contention that arose was whether this article meant that the two houses of parliament were to select the members of the constitutional assembly and leave the business of writing the constitution to that body or whether members of parliament also had the right to take part in the drafting of the constitution. Naturally, liberals and secularists were of the first opinion while Islamists, who now formed the parliamentary majority, insisted on the latter. After much wrangling, it was decided that half the members of the constitutional assembly would be drawn from parliament and the other half would be drawn from outside parliament to include public figures and representatives of all sectors of the public. The two sides had haggled over every point, from the philosophical to the sociological. Then, when the selection process was put into effect and produced a concrete reality in the form of an assembly consisting 76 per cent Islamists, the majority of the 24 per cent non- Islamists withdrew. Herein resides the essence of the story from the outset. It is the story of the balance of political forces, which has favoured the Islamists in roughly this ratio since the referendum on the constitutional amendments on 19 March 2011 and the Constitutional Declaration that sprang from that referendum. The results of that referendum came as a huge shock to liberal and secularist forces. They had imagined that, since the revolutionary youth were from the secularist ranks and since even the Muslim Brotherhood youth that took part in the revolution were liberal for the most part, the Egyptian political mood had changed. Then, suddenly, they opened their eyes to find that the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis had thrown themselves into the electoral battle in full vigour, not only wielding the religious card at every turn, but also flexing their superior organisational and financial muscle and, frankly, playing the political game as it should be played, which is to say among the people. Our secularist friends, meanwhile, waged their campaigns via television and satellite airwaves. Then they withdrew from the battle as they hurled accusations at their adversaries, charging them variously with fraud, deceit and even treachery, using an independent "million man march" towards this end. But, by that time, these million man marches had become an indirect source of support for the Muslim Brothers and Salafis who had begun to boycott them, demonstrating that they were more responsible and more concerned for the plight of the general public than other groups whose reasons for demonstrating were never clear to the masses. When this reality struck home to the secularists, they turned the finger of blame against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and began to sound the cry for the fall of the generals who, in turn, had no option but to press ahead with the roadmap for parliamentary and presidential elections. This is precisely what the Islamists wanted. Not only did they have the advantages of organisational and financial superiority, the revolutionary youth and secularists were fighting other battles. Instead of fighting the electoral battle, they fought to prove that SCAF lied and that the Islamists were in cahoots with SCAF. Then they tried to forge for themselves a revolutionary legitimacy distinct from the political legitimacy that derives from the electoral process. Eventually, they gave up fighting windmills and entered the electoral fray, only to lose by the same percentage as they lost the referendum and other polls. All the battles were political ones of the first order. The Islamists fought them with considerable skill while the secularists not only remained sharply divided but also routinely managed the political conflicts with a mentality inclined more to registering stances before throwing in the towel than to doing the real work needed to change the public mood and to promote a tangible shift in the balance of powers. Moreover, the more that the liberals withdrew from the battles in this manner, the more this played into the hands of the Islamists who took advantage of every opportunity to claim that this demonstrated how strongly public opinion supported them. In a sense, they were right. However, they have overlooked the dynamics of the political process in which levels of support change once a party or a group comes into power and assumes actual responsibility, whether in parliament or the executive. In this respect, the story of the balance of powers is far from over yet.
