2012 Annual Conference - Panel 2 Transcript: Challenges Ahead for Egypt

The below transcript is from the Middle East Institute's 66th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, November 14, 2012

Panel 2: Challenges Ahead for Egypt

Jonathan Brown, Georgetown University
Nathan Brown, George Washington University
Amr Hamzawy, Egypt Freedom Party
Nancy Okail, Freedom House
Moderator: Khaled Elgindy, Brookings Institution

Kate Seelye:  We are beginning our second panel of the day, “The Challenges Ahead for Egypt.” The panel is in extremely good hands: our moderator, Khaled Elgindy, is a Fellow with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a founding Board Member of the Egyptian-American Rule of Law Association, established in the spring of 2011. Khaled has been writing extensively on Egypt and the Arab Spring, as well as working on his other great passion, the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. Before coming to Brookings, Khaled was an advisor to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on permanent status negotiations with Israel and was a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations of 2008, among many other positions.

Khaled Elgindy:  Thank you, Kate, and thank you all for being here in what I think will be an extremely enlightening, eye-opening and riveting discussion on the situation in Egypt, which as most of you know has been undergoing a very difficult dynamic and also sometimes unsettling transition over the last two years or so.

Each of our four distinguished speakers will speak for about twelve minutes and then we’ll open it up for a discussion. Let me start off quickly just by introducing each of our four distinguished speakers in the order in which they will present.

First we will hear from Dr. Amr Hamzawy, who is a distinguished Egyptian political scientist and President of the Egypt Freedom Party (Masr al-Hurreyya). He was elected recently to the Egyptian People’s Assembly, after the uprising of last year, in the first parliamentary elections held after the January 25th revolution. He is currently a Professor in the Public Policy and Administration Department at the American University in Cairo, a Professor of Political Science at Cairo University, and a member of the National Council on Human Rights in Egypt. Dr. Hamzawy previously taught at the Free University of Berlin, from which he received his PhD. His most recent book, Getting to Pluralism: Political Actors in the Arab World, co-edited with Marina Ottaway, was published in 2009. Dr. Hamzawy regularly contributes articles to academic journals and writes a daily column for the Egyptian independent daily newspaper Al Watan. He’s certainly no stranger to Washington, DC, as he served many years here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Amr Hamzawy:  Good morning. Thank you very much, Khaled, it’s a pleasure to be here. Since I have twelve minutes, let me start right away by looking at the subject matter, which is the drafting process of Egypt’s new constitution. Let me outline a couple of critical remarks.

To let you know where I’m coming from, I belong to a group of MPs and former parliamentarians in the former People’s Assembly which decided when the Constituent Assembly – a Constituent Assembly is an assembly to draft the constitution – when it was elected for the first time, we decided to withdraw, and in the second time decided to boycott the elections. We decided to withdraw in the first time and in the second time to boycott the elections of the Constituent Assembly for simple reasons which I’m going to outline briefly. I believe those reasons are visible in the draft constitution we are looking at now and in the crisis surrounding the drafting process of Egypt’s new constitution.

We decided to withdraw from the first Assembly and to boycott the elections of the second, which continues to exist up until now, for different reasons. Number one, we – and here the reference is to liberal forces and liberal parliamentarians in Egypt – we saw that Islamists were creating an Assembly of their own, an Assembly in which the political Islam component was going to be dominant in a way which is imminent as of now. We decided to withdraw and to boycott the elections because we saw a dominance of political parties and party politicians in a Constituent Assembly which should have been representative of all Egyptians, of different sectors of our society – it’s not true. The Constituent Assembly has become a domain for party dominance, for political party domination. We saw a clear domination of political parties in the Constituent Assembly.

We were unsatisfied with the procedures devised for the Assembly: an Assembly of 100 members to pass constitutional articles based on A) consensus; B) to a certain majority; C) at 57 percent majority, which was clearly going to go in the direction of the strong representation of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as of Salafi groups. The two major forces within the political Islam spectrum were bound to take it in their way.

[There were] additional reasons, such as a marginalization of women and their representation in the Constituent Assembly – less than 5 percent representation as of now – and the marginalization of the representation of non-Muslims in Egypt in the Assembly. Finally, because once again the Constituent Assembly was created based on a process of negotiations between political actors which did not reach its ultimate ends. It was dominated by the heavy weight of Islamists in the former (dissolved) People’s Assembly and their domination in the existing continues to exist, through the Second Chamber of the Egyptian Parliament.

So different deficits of the Constituent Assembly, to my mind, have led to the current draft which we are looking at and where I am going to focus my presentation. I would like to outline five troubling issues in the current draft of the Egyptian constitution, and I am referring – and Nathan Brown will appreciate the accuracy – to the draft of October 24, released and visible and accessible on the website of the Constituent Assembly (www.dostour.eg.org).

Number one, with regard to personal rights and freedoms, the current draft of the constitution eats away the principle of equality between women and men and the principle of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. The reference is primarily to Article 68 in the Second Chapter of the constitution, in which equality is related to a phrase – and here I am quoting – to the rulings of the Islamic shari’a. The reference is not to the principles of shari’a, as it is in Article 2 in the current draft constitution and as it has been in Egypt since 1982, in the previous constitution governing us until the revolution (the 1971 constitution referring to the principles of Islamic shari’a as the prime source of legislation). The reference is in Article 68 to the rulings of the Islamic shari’a and of course it does not take much knowledge to know that what we mean by the teachings and rulings of shari’a is a highly contested issue. Unlike the reference to principles of shari’a, which has been consensus-based in Egypt throughout the last three decades – we have a body coming out of the Supreme Constitutional Court as well as of Al-Azhar, the official religious establishment, outlining what that means for legislative purposes – we do not have the same body. We do not have the same clarity with regard to the rulings. What frightens liberals in Egypt is the fact that many Islamist members of the Constituent Assembly have been interpreting that reference in a way that eats away at equality between women and men, also the personal freedoms of women, including eligibility to run for political positions such as the presidency, prime ministership, minister positions as well as governor positions. The same goes for non-Muslims as well. So we have a first problematic issue related to personal freedoms and political rights, where those rights – especially of women and non-Muslims – are not guaranteed and safeguarded in the constitution in the current draft.

The second troubling issue is how the complex [relationship of] religion, state and politics is managed and engineered in the new draft constitution. Here I’m referring to, for those who are reading the different drafts, Chapter One, primarily on the state and on state and society. The engineering of the relationship between state, religion and politics in the phrasing has different ambiguities which might open up the space in Egypt for the development of a religious-based state. I’m referring to Article 4, Chapter One, on Al-Azhar, the official religious establishment. This is stating that Al-Azhar’s opinion – or Al-Azhar is to be consulted with regard to different legislative issues pertaining to Islamic shari’a, without outlining who is going to ask for Al-Azhar’s opinion. Is it going to be the legislature, parliament, or is it going to be the judicial branch of government? Is it up to any Egyptian citizen to go and consult with Al-Azhar with regard to different legislative matters pertaining to Islamic shari’a, and what does that mean for the process of legislation in Egypt? In earlier drafts that Article 4 had Al-Azhar’s role in more of a compelling manner, stipulating that Al-Azhar should be consulted and that Al-Azhar has an interpretation sovereignty with regard to what shari’a means for the legislative process in Egypt. That is no longer with us in the current draft but once again the articulation and stipulations of Article 4 are quite problematic.

Secondly, we have in the last chapter, Chapter Five, Article 220, interpreting what principles of shari’a mean in a way which moves beyond what has been consensus-based in Egypt throughout the last decades.

Finally, with regard to the complex state of religion and politics, we no longer have the ban on parties based on a religious frame of reference, as has been the case in Egypt with regard to the 1971 constitution as well as the constitutional declaration of March 2011, which has governed Egyptian politics throughout the last two years. Not that stipulation of banning political parties established on a religious frame of reference did work out in reality – we do have legal political parties established clearly with a religious frame of reference. However, to lift that ban from the constitution opens up the door in Egypt for more unorganized and unsystematized inclusion of religion in politics, and the principle of separation between religion and politics is no longer respected.

The third issue, which is to my mind – because our Islamist friends in Egypt keep telling us that we focus only on personal freedoms, women’s rights and equality among citizens, and on issues pertaining to religion and the state – not that those issues are of minor importance in a constitution, they are crucial for a constitution if we are seriously interested in building a democratic state and society. But it’s not true that we only focus or are only preoccupied with issues pertaining to personal freedoms and the complex state of religion and politics. Let me shift to the third issue, which is as problematic in the draft constitution, which is the engineering of the political system. Based on the current draft constitution, Egypt’s president continues to have the same prerogatives and authorities which Egyptian presidents had since 1954. We continue to have not simply a presidential system but an undemocratic presidential system where the president has vast authorities and prerogatives unchecked – no oversight. Only one article on oversight with regard to the president, on treason, and no clear stipulations on different checks and balances as to empower parliament and the judicial branch of government (and independent oversight institutions) with regard to the president.

Not only that, parliamentary prerogatives and authorities are being undermined in at least one article (Article 196) stipulating that the budget of the military establishment and legislation pertaining to the military establishment are to be discussed in an appointed council, in the so-called National Defense Council. Then the budget will be pushed to parliament as one figure, which means the parliament will not be able to discuss the budget of the military establishment seriously, and it necessitates an approval of that appointed council with regard to laws and legislation pertaining to the armed forces. So the principle of civil state oversight, of elected civilians, vis-à-vis military and security institutions and establishments is not guaranteed. We continue to have an undemocratic presidential system with a diminished role of parliament and with a special status for the military establishment, as if we did not go through what we did go through throughout the last six decades.

The fourth problematic issue in the current draft constitution pertains to the system of local government. Once again, one of the main reasons for Egypt’s failures throughout the last decades to democratize, to open up its polity, has been the centralization of the Egyptian government and the lack of incentives for decentralization. If you look at the constitution of 1971 and you compare it to the current draft constitution, it is as if not a single year passed in between. We continue to have the same centralized local government, same centralized local administration system, no incentives for decentralization, governors to be appointed by the president, budget sovereignty with the central government, no real role with regard to governorates, and so on. So one of the greatest impediments of Egypt’s democratization throughout the last six decades, which is the centralization of the government, continues to exist.

The fifth issue, and to prove once again that we are not simply preoccupied with personal freedoms and women’s rights only, is issues pertaining to social and economic rights in the current draft constitution. The reference is to the second chapter on rights and freedoms. Issues pertaining to social and economic rights are not addressed in a way which corresponds to the popular demand on social justice in Egypt. Social and economic rights, education, healthcare, social safety networks and so on are not safeguarded in a way which would be conducive to a socially responsible liberal market economy. They are addressed in a way which eats away what Egyptians did have in the last six decades in an unprecedented manner.

Those are five big issues in the draft constitution. As a result, liberal forces outside of the Constituent Assembly continue their struggle for newly forming the Assembly and for a better constitution, which Egypt does deserve after its democratic revolution. Liberal forces inside the Assembly have threatened as of today in fact that they are going to withdraw unless different adjustments are going to take place in the current draft constitution, addressing the five issues which I outlined, and unless the Constituent Assembly is extended time-wise in its work by three additional months, to avoid (as we say in Egypt) prematurely getting done with the constitution without real discussion and without offering Egyptians the constitution they deserve after a democratic revolution. Thank you very much.

Khaled Elgindy:  Our next speaker, Dr. Nathan Brown, will round out the discussion on the constitution and give us a broader perspective on how this process is going among other institutions in Egyptian society – the military, the judiciary and others. Dr. Brown is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University here in Washington and a recipient of Fulbright Grants to study in Egypt and the Gulf and teach in Israel. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of When Victory Is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics and Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine, among other publications. Dr. Brown received his BA in political science from the University of Chicago and his master’s and PhD in politics and Near East studies from Princeton University. His dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 1987. Please join me in welcoming Professor Brown.

Nathan Brown:  Thank you very much. I’m actually not going to start with Egypt and the constitutional process and the reason is that this panel is a special treat for me: I come immediately after Amr Hamzawy, who is a very dear friend and former co-author, a colleague, and actually also a former neighbor of mine. He lived in Vienna, Virginia, not far from where I live. He’s been so busy lately the only time I see him now is on panels. I want to tell him how my kids are doing, find out how his are. But what I will do instead of going through all that is bring him just a little bit of disturbing news from your old home in Vienna: an incident that happened a couple months ago, and I’m just reading from the police report. “A town employee reported at 10:28 am on August 28 there was a snowman hanging from a tree with fake blood on it in the 300 block of Glindon Street, NE. The snowman was stuffed with beer cans where his lights were supposed to be.” Now, you listen to this and all kinds of questions – five questions: snowman? Tree? August? Beer, blood? Some mysteries will never be explained. But the Town of Vienna Police do not bother even to try to answer those questions. Instead they hurry to reassure you, and I’m reading from the police report: “The town employee was able to free the snowman and took him to a place where he would be cared for properly.”

I thought I would actually use that as a metaphor for what I’m going to do in talking about Egypt today. Some things are simply too complicated to understand. There is a political process which would take hours to explain and even then I’m not sure we would understand it. The real question is, is the snowman being cared for properly? A little bit of strain, given the Egyptian climate, to liken this Egyptian society to the snowman, but that’s the approach I want to take. When you focus on this day-to-day you see an awful lot of confusion. Is this a political process that is fundamentally going to deliver a sounder political system that will meet the needs of the Egyptian people?

The answer I think is basically: yeah, kind of, I think so, but there’s some problems. What I want to do is focus first on the political process as a whole and then specifically on the constitutional process and pick up some of the issues that Amr raised, and talk about what’s going right and what’s going wrong.

Political process – again, big picture, when we step back and like the Town of Vienna Police concentrate only on the big picture and whether things are being properly cared for – you have a meaningful political process. You have had elections in which outcomes were not known in advance. You have the slow civilianization of political authority in Egypt in a way that the country hasn’t seen. You have for the first time a president of the republic who comes not from the military but essentially from the civil society. Those are things that are fundamentally healthy. You have a real political process underway in which genuine political issues are being debated. The level of sophistication of some of the discussions about the constitution are ones that are actually very impressive. We’ve heard some of those things from Amr.

But there are two big issues that do give me some concern about the political process as a whole. Number one is just the degree of polarization within Egyptian politics today. Again, let me go back to Virginia, where I live right now. Anybody in this room who lives in Virginia knows what it’s like to live in a swing state shortly before a presidential election. You are absolutely harangued by anonymous calls that get increasingly shrill as the election gets closer. Nothing would prepare you better for the state of Egyptian political discourse today than the kind of really nasty, negative campaigning that takes place right before a presidential election here.

The missing element, however, right now is that you have a political structure in which those various forces don’t really know how to talk to each other and they have no place to talk to each other. The dissolution of parliament which took place earlier this year was one that was fundamentally unhealthy for that process. Regardless of your opinion of what the parliament was up to, there was at least a place where various political forces had to come and deal with each other in order to get things done. And that’s no longer the case. You’ve got basically one re-elected structure right now in Egyptian politics and that’s the presidency.

That leads me to the second thing. The approach of the presidency specifically in the Brotherhood generally I think is that yes, they realize there are other political forces in the country that they have to come to terms with but the ones they are most concerned about are the ones inside the Egyptian state. They seem to do a much better job bargaining with the military and the judiciary than they do with other political forces. From their behavior it seems that their biggest concern for other political forces are state structures or, to the extent that they look to the society, they are concerned about the Salafi movements. We will hear more about the Salafi movements from Jack Brown I hope. But there’s no real effective process, I think, by which the groups that call themselves now the “civil political forces” really have a sustained and meaningful dialogue with those in authority.

Let me turn now specifically to the constitutional process. Here I would give a slightly rosier version than the one we just heard from Amr but it is still one with significant problems. What is going right? On the religious provisions of the Egyptian constitution, when you keep in mind the fact that Egyptian elections returned a strong showing for religious parties, the sort of compromise language that is coming out of the Constituent Assembly is certainly not the kind of constitution that I would write for my country but it is not an unreasonable compromise given the array of forces in Egyptian political life today. There is also the possibility for a consensus outcome on many different issues that appear at first to be divisive. You won’t know that if you follow the debate day to day and there’s a reason for that, I think: the Islamists simply dominate the Assembly. That means anytime things come for a vote they win, and that’s the way the rules are written. If ultimately it comes to a vote the Islamists win. The non-Islamists in the Assembly have only one tool. They can’t win any vote but they can threaten to walk out, with the result that the document would be presented to the Egyptian people not as a consensus outcome but as one that is essentially over the dead bodies of the civil political forces. That’s a potent threat to use but it’s the only one they have to use and so they use it repeatedly, over and over. So you have this extremely noisy political debate.

Ultimately I think a negotiated solution is possible. One of the reasons has to do with the basic interest of the most dominant force in that Assembly, the Freedom and Justice Party of the Muslim Brotherhood. They realize, I think, that any constitution that comes out of this Assembly is likely to set in motion a political process in which they will do fine, thank you. So any document that comes out of that Assembly is essentially fine with them. That’s not true for everybody and certainly not true for the Salafis but I think that is true for the Brotherhood. So [indiscernible], a major Freedom and Justice Party figure, said just yesterday he was talking about dropping the provision in the Egyptian constitution that would mandate zakar, or alms payment. It was an interesting comment, he said: Look, there’s pilgrimage, there’s fasting, there’s Ramadan, those things aren’t mentioned in the constitution. Why do you have to mention this in the constitution? This already exists in Egypt, you don’t need to put it in the document. The Brotherhood realizes that it doesn’t matter so much what these say.

Article 68, which Amr talked about, is one that in the latest authoritative draft exists as he said but there are indications now that the Brotherhood will simply say: Fine, we’ll just drop that article. It makes everybody upset so let’s just drop the entire thing. Again, that’s a process by which they can essentially come to agreement with other political forces. It’s going to be very difficult for them to come to an agreement simultaneously with the Salafis and with the civil political forces in the same Assembly, but given clever drafters I’m not sure that some kind of consensus outcome is impossible.

The parts of the constitutional process that worry me are actually two other parts. One was one that Amr talked about. Because there is so much focus on what I would consider to be the symbolic and the religious provisions, there is a little bit less of a focus on nuts and bolts – and especially about executive authority, which has been the Achilles heel of past Egyptian constitutional documents (and I would say in the Arab world generally). Mechanisms of accountability are simply very weakly developed. What I see emerging out of the Constituent Assembly in Egypt right now I would describe as a presidential document masquerading as a semi-presidential document. They simply haven’t given enough attention to the fine print of how it is that there is going to be meaningful political oversight from various structures, most especially but not exclusively the parliament, over all parts of the political process.

So if I were to give any advice to the Constituent Assembly, I would say: Come to your agreement on religious issues and move on, because this really needs your serious attention. It really needs attention, to think about things like how you’re going to form a majority government, what kind of mechanisms of oversight there will be for the parliament over the security services, what kind of real meaningful guarantees will there be for judicial independence, and so on.

The second problem with the constitutional process that I see developing is in a sense similar to what I talked about for the political process as a whole: what kind of negotiation is going on? Again, a real interesting story out of Egypt yesterday. The Ministry of Defense says that Article so-and-so about barring military courts from trying civilians is unacceptable. Think about that for a second. Who is writing this constitution? It sounds to me like an awful lot of the actual drafting that is going on is again various parts of the Egyptian state negotiating with each other. So the judiciary shows up with their demands. One of the noisiest bodies is something called the State Cases Authority, and I can explain it to you but it would probably take me about ten minutes rather than two minutes to explain what the State Cases Authority actually is. But they are very noisy in making particular demands of the constitution. The judiciary is showing up, Al-Azhar is showing up. Imagine if you were to have a constitution drafting in this country where the United States decided to have a new constitution and people from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI and the federal judiciary and so forth just showed up and said, “Here’s what we need to see in the document.”

So it winds up that the Egyptian state is constituting the document rather than being constituted by it. The role for essentially civil political forces in this gets a little bit marginalized. It’s not to me the ideal way to come up with a consensus document but it’s a very good way of entrenching existing authorities and essentially giving each one of them probably a little more autonomy than would be justified, and insulating them in a sense from any kind of oversight of any political process.

In sum, when I think about this as a whole and I compare Egypt of 2012 to Egypt of 2010, I say this is a healthier political climate. There are real issues being debated and there are real alternative visions being offered to the Egyptian people. This is fundamentally a freer and more pluralistic environment. It is one in which various political forces in Egyptian life have some purchase, have some weight to pursue their visions.

So big picture: yes, there is something that is very healthy that has happened in Egypt that I don’t think can be easily reversed. But when I look to the nitty-gritty of how this is happening I still have a gnawing concern in my stomach that five years from now what we will see is something I called in a different context “the wrong Turkish model.” I’m sorry, now I have to end on a sad ending. But one in which you have essentially one dominant political party that operates within what still is a meaningfully democratic system but one which cannot be really effectively challenged by other political actors and which slowly molds the state to its own image. I think that’s better than where Egypt is coming from in 2010 but I still think it would be a disappointing outcome in light of the high hopes of the Egyptian revolution. Thank you.

Khaled Elgindy:  Thanks, Nathan. Our next speaker is another Dr. Brown, Jonathan Brown, also a professor. Jack Brown is an Associate Professor of Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He received his doctorate in Near East languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown’s book publications include The Canonization of Al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon; Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World; and Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction. He has published articles in the fields of hadith, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and pre-Islamic poetry, and is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include the history of forgery and historical criticism in Islamic civilization and modern conflicts between late Sunni traditionalism and Salafism in Islamic thought. With such a profound understanding of Islamic history and theology and law, we are going to hear from Professor Brown on the role of Islamists, in particular the Salafis, in Egyptian society.

Jonathan Brown:  Thank you very much for inviting me. This is a very distinguished panel and I’m honored to be on it.

The first thing to keep in mind when we speak about Salafis and Salafist Islam is that this is a theological and legal school of thought. It’s not a political movement or a political school of thought. What happens when it gets mapped onto the political scene is that the term becomes very problematic. It is misused so often in both the Arabic and the English-language press that sometimes I think we should just stop using the term Salafi altogether, because what happens is you end up talking about very different entities using the same term and then being confused about why these entities are behaving differently.

Briefly, to talk about the four different groups that are referred to broadly by the term Salafi in Egypt. The first is what’s called the al-Dawa al-Salafiya or the Salafi Call Organization, which is a very prominent, influential, Alexandria-based Salafi group with its own history and unique experience with the Mubarak state. This is the main force behind the Nour political party, which received 25 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections. The Nour Party is a political expression of the Salafi Call Organization from Alexandria.

The second major group of people who are called Salafis are the Salafis who are either linked to the Muslim Brotherhood or in the Muslim Brotherhood.

The third group, sort of amorphous body of more independent Salafi scholars, many of them very politically quietist at the doctrinaire level – in other words, they don’t get involved in politics because they consider this to be Islamically unacceptable.

Finally, the last group, which is really completely inaccurately referred to as Salafis. I think we should just dismiss it as something we discuss when we talk about Salafis in Egypt because it’s so unrelated – the so-called Salafi jihadis operating in northern Sinai. These groups are completely different and are much more involved with the Gaza area and the Israel-Palestine question, and can’t really be talked about under the same rubric as the Salafi groups in mainstream Egyptian life and Egyptian political life.

Why is it important to distinguish between these four groups? Because they behave very differently politically. When the “Salafis” got involved in politics after the revolution, people came out and said, “Why are you getting involved in politics now and trying to be involved in the revolution? Before you didn’t care.” That’s not true. The Salafi Call in Alexandria had a very strong political opinion in the Mubarak and Sadat years and they decided strategically not to be involved in politics, but that’s not because they were against the idea of being involved in politics – they just didn’t see it as being practical at that point. When you look at the first round of presidential elections, when the Salafi vote was split between people voting for [indiscernible] and the Egyptian Brotherhood candidate, the reason why there’s a split in the Salafi ranks there is because some of them are the Muslim Brotherhood and some of them are not in the Muslim Brotherhood.

To speak briefly about the main Salafi party in Egypt, the Nour Party, which right now is extremely influential in drafting the constitution, its history is very interesting and important. The Salafi Call Organization in Alexandria made a considered decision to start a political party after the Egyptian revolution. I think this political party was very maturely designed, which was that it was never supposed to affect negatively the primary work of the Salafi Call Organization, which is religious education and preaching. The sense was the second this political party or politics starts affecting our main activity of religious activism it can be detached basically, like a gecko’s tail. It can just fall off.

That is a very mature way to think about politics and religion. The problem is that the existence of the Nour Party is very tenuous in relation to the Salafi Call Organization, the religious organization in Alexandria. The main purpose of Alexandrian Salafi involvement in politics after the revolution was, one, to work to protect conservative Muslims in Egypt who had suffered so severely under the oppressive legal regime of Mubarak’s Egypt; and two, to move the country more towards shari’a compliance and the rule of shari’a law. These were the two main goals.

Now, what you have seen since the formation of the party is the emergence more and more of serious tensions within the Nour Party and between it and the religious leadership of the Salafi movement in Alexandria. These tensions have emerged because the party really has to deliver results. It has to be able to say: We are advancing the interests of Salafis, we’re moving toward a more shari’a-compliant state.

A lot of the Salafi political operators who are in the Nour Party have a broader agenda, which I think is also a laudable agenda, which is that they want to move Egypt more towards good governance, economic productivity, rule of law, things that are broadly acceptable and laudable in Egyptian political life. The problem is it’s very difficult to sell these ideas to a religious constituency that sees as one of its main priorities making some specific changes in the way the state sees or defines shari’a law. So these tensions have emerged and if they continue to grow, I think it will mean very serious doubts about whether the Nour Party will have a showing that’s anywhere near as good as the showing it had in the earlier parliamentary elections.

When you talk about getting results, this gets us to the current issue of drafting the constitution. The current interest of not just the Nour Party but also conservative Islamists from within the Muslim Brotherhood who are on the constitutional drafting committee is to push the Egyptian constitution’s recognition of shari’a forward. So beyond what it was in the 1970s and the 1980s revision of the constitution, to a more overt recognition of the rules of shari’a as the primary source for law in Egypt. This is very important, just as a symbolic victory, because it would mean that this very conservative Islamist group could return to their constituents and say: These are the results we’ve gotten. I know oftentimes people think, why are these minor differences in wording so important? It’s very important to conservative Islamists who consider the state’s commitment to shari’a law to be absolutely essential for that state’s legitimacy.

So basically what you have right now when it comes to difference of opinion on Article 2 of the constitution, the place of shari’a law in the constitution, is the establishment Azhar group, which is aligned with more liberal groups and more liberal wings of the Muslim Brotherhood (represented by the current president of Egypt), which is basically: we accept the status quo. Article 2 says the principles of Islamic shari’a are the main source of legislation in Egypt – that’s great. For Azhar, they have long ago accepted this as legitimate Islamically. For the more liberal wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, they have long ago come to peace with this as an acceptable understanding of the shari’a.

But – and this is where I think there’s actually hope for the future, and I think not so much disagreement – if you look at Article 220 of the constitution, which actually defines what these mabadi [phonetic] are, what the principles of the shari’a are – this Article 220 has been endorsed by Nour Party representatives, it enjoys a lot of support from conservative Islamists in the constitution drafting committee. What this Article 220 says is that the principles of Islamic shari’a are basically general pieces of evidence from the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet; the legal and procedural maxims of the shari’a; and the sources of law considered acceptable by Sunni Muslims. All the legal reforms that have been pursued in Egypt over the last fifty years, whether it’s attempts to ban female circumcision, raising the age at which marriages can be registered for women to the age of sixteen, allowing the receipt of interest on bank accounts – all these things are completely acceptable within that definition of shari’a law. So Article 220 presents a vision of shari’a law which is completely acceptable to the status quo in Egyptian law. It’s also been endorsed by some of the main spokespeople for the more conservative Islamist contingent in the constitution drafting committee.

As Nathan Brown, my senior and non-relative, said, the Islamists win. At a certain point, I think people have to accept that Egyptians have gone to the polls seven times now and every single time the majority of them has said: We want a more committed statement about Islamic identity in Egypt. Reading the draft constitution, I’m actually surprised by how absent Islam is from the document. I think if you just take out [indiscernible] or mabadi [phonetic] and just have Article 2 say “shari’a law”; if you include Article 220 in its current understanding; if you accept that both Azhar and Salafi groups have said that they’re okay with the Supreme Constitutional Court being the ultimate body who determines what is and isn’t compatible with shari’a law – I think you get an affirmation of Islamic identity which meets the demands of the majority of the population as expressed through polls, and you also get a document that is not going to fundamentally change the legal landscape of Egypt or the lifestyles of those people who don’t embrace Islamic identity. Thank you very much.

Khaled Elgindy:  Thank you, Jack. Very interesting as always. Our last and certainly not least speaker is Nancy Okail, who is the Director of Freedom House’s Egypt Program. Dr. Okail has a PhD in international development from the University of Sussex, with a focus on the power relations of aid, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She has over twelve years’ experience in promoting democracy and development in the Middle East and North Africa region. Dr. Okail worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and has managed programs for Egyptian pro-democracy organizations that challenged the Mubarak regime. She was also one of the defendants in the widely publicized foreign NGO case going on in Egypt, which I think is still ongoing, is it not? Yes. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Okail, who will be speaking on the role of civil society in Egypt.

Nancy Okail:  Thank you so much, Khaled. It’s such a privilege to be here and also a great privilege to speak among the distinguished panelists. They are also very wise because they followed the wisdom of letting the woman have the last word.

Not so long ago, the protestors in Tahrir Square [in Arabic]: civic state, not Islamic, not military.  A lot of people have been talking about, we want to have a civic state in Egypt. But little did people talk about, what does this mean? And there was always a misconception about what is really the role of civil society, what they do and how they can play a role in the transition to democracy in Egypt. This has been the case before the toppling of the Mubarak regime and continued later on.

What I will talk about today is to just give you a background on what was the status of civil society in Egypt before the toppling of the Mubarak regime, the role they played during the revolution and where they stand right now.

Twelve years ago I was working at the World Bank and I had this crazy idea that in order to have real reform in Egypt, I should leave my job and go work in the Egyptian government to reform from within. It was of course naïve. I remember I was diagnosed with a slight dyslexia and when I asked my therapist what this means, he said: You have a tendency to go in the wrong direction. Hence my career path.

I worked at the Ministry of Social Affairs. One of the first things we wanted to do is to really understand the size and capacity of civil society organizations in Egypt. On paper, there were 90,000 registered NGOs in Egypt. The number of course was exaggerated. We wanted to understand who they were and what they were doing. Some of them were just on paper but the ones we tried to go and visit and understand their capacity, we would go and find a small door with a lock on it in a basement, with no activities and no one there. Sometimes we would ask, where is the person who is responsible for this? One time the board member was taken to a mental institute, things like that. It’s not really a joke and there were many situations where we found this.

But the ones that we found operating were very weak in their capacity, with very limited activities. The activities were confined to mainly three: Qur’an memorization, distribution of pilgrimage tickets, and some very minor health services. The members of the NGOs, when we asked them, what is your affiliation? They always took pride that they are a member of the party (of course we had one party, the National Democratic Party). Or it was headed by someone whose title started with General, someone from the military, which sometimes used to be the retirement package for military men to head an organization. Or someone who was affiliated with the government. All of this is anything but civil society, because it is exactly the antithesis of what defines a civil society. So this is the status of what it was, in terms of capacity.

In terms of the operating environment, the civil society organizations at that time were governed by Law 84, which was very restrictive. It put restrictions on the receiving of funding, the kinds of activities they can conduct, and it affected their liberty and their effectiveness in society. By 2005 this situation started to change. The reason it started to change is that the law did not change but many organizations try to go around this law and register themselves as civil companies. They used to have the saying: we would rather bear the hell of taxes than the heaven of the social affairs. By registering as civil companies they were able to operate and they became more vibrant and effective, to the extent that by 2011 they became so effective that so many people attributed the revolution to the work of civil society groups and organizations. Many of them were very quick to try to take pride in that, thinking that they really had a revolution and they should take pride in that. Only shortly to know that they were indicted because of this very reason.

In January 2012, the Minister of International Cooperation came out in a press conference in the case that was taken against the civil society organizations in Egypt and foreign NGOs, and tried to play on the sentiments of the Egyptian people. He said that civil society organizations should have only one role: to provide bread for the people of Egypt. It was very known that people were suffering. There was an economic decline. Because of that, she thought that by doing that she was appeasing to the people and also contributing to this whole smear campaign that was rising in the media against civil society organizations.

At the same time, a blogger wrote a piece that made a very strong impact in the Egyptian social media sphere. The blog was, translated in English – in Arabic it has a bit of foul language – it said: The poor first, you bastards. The idea was that everyone after the revolution was seeing that there are people on the elitist level talking about politics, and whether to have the constitution first, no we have to have the parliament first, no the presidential first. People were in a way asking themselves – the poor – how is this benefiting me? How is this affecting the poor? You are forgetting about the poor. They are hearing eloquent speakers every day on talk shows on Egyptian television and they are not seeing where does this relate to them, to their poverty and problems.

The disappointment came when so many Egyptian politicians came out with articles being apologetic and saying, yes, we forgot the poor and we are sorry, we have been so engaged in this whole political discussion. It was such a disappointment because I would have expected that they would have highlighted where is the link between this whole political debate and the poverty of the people, making people understand that – and this is where the role of civil society should have come – that they create this link as holding the government accountable to these groups. We can’t provide all the funding and all the bread and all the means for these people who are suffering at low income levels, but you can guarantee that this money will not be stolen or absorbed. This is where the role of civil society comes: they hold the government and parliament accountable. But because there is always this misconception about the role of civil society before the toppling of Mubarak and later on after that, it was not really understood or clear for the people what they can do.

The civil society organizations have a big role to play. If we look at the framework of transitional justice, we see that they have a lot to offer. Working with organizations in Africa and also in Latin America, I’ve seen how youth were trained and told how they can hold their local councils accountable, how they can have a role in participatory budgeting, how they can have a role in the decentralization of governance. This was all missed and misunderstood in the role of civil society in the country. Because in Egypt we had this whole smear campaign against civil society, there was a misconception for people of really their intentions.

If time allows, let me give you an example of how misunderstood the role of civil society is. This was a piece from what the prosecutor said as a conclusion on what civil society are doing. Civil society organizations “lured innocent people by conducting training courses on managing electoral campaigns but in fact they were making surveys and questionnaires over different sectors of society with the intention of making a certain degree of influence and break through the roots of our society, aiming at spreading chaos and disorder and destabilizing our social and economic, using the passion of innocence to achieve and rise the principle of democracy.” This is an accusation actually. This is why civil society in Egypt are restricted and are not able to play the role they need to play in Egypt.

I have to wrap up but I wanted to allude to yesterday’s – if you attended the dinner, Mohammed Jameel was talking about the aspiration of having more micro-credit projects in Egypt and providing employment opportunities. The same with the Sawiris Foundation. We can have all this and we can have more funding, but without accountability mechanisms and without having civil society playing this role and holding those people in power accountable, there’s no guarantee that the fruits of all these efforts will be delivered to the poor. Thank you very much.

Q&A

Khaled Elgindy:  Thank you, Nancy, and thank you to all of our excellent speakers for what I thought were extremely hard-hitting, profound, thought-provoking presentations. We’re now going to open up to questions and answers. While you’re lining up, let me take the first question, which I’ll put to anyone on the panel who would like to answer. I was struck by this missing ingredient that seems to be missing not only in Egypt but also given recent events in Syria and, you could argue, Palestine and elsewhere in the region, that what actors in the region are missing isn’t institutions – what’s needed is not institution-building but actually consensus-building. It’s the one thing that not only the Islamists but other groups in Egypt seem to not do very well: to find a way to share the same political and social sphere and space. Is that actually an issue? How relevant is that? Is that a role for civil society to be that venue, forum and space where these different actors can come to terms with one another? It seems, as Nathan Brown pointed out, it’s much easier for these political groups to come to terms with structures of the state than it is to come to terms with one another in society.

So I’m wondering if you might comment on this idea of consensus-building. How do you go about doing this? This debate on identity is now almost two years old and it seems we ought to be well beyond this, but is it? Is it an obstacle or is it a necessary hurdle that we need to get over in order to have this consensus?

Amr Hamzawy:  Let me agree with what Nathan referred to, which is it’s much easier for political actors, parties, movements – formal political actors as well as informal political actors – to get to consensus-building mechanisms and measures if they are in institutions. So we had a brief period in which the People’s Assembly did work, with all the difficulties that we encountered as parliamentarians belonging to the minority in the People’s Assembly – an un-Islamist minority in the People’s Assembly – we were in different endeavors close to building consensus. Even with regard to the Constituent Assembly, two times we were close to building consensus but we failed, for different reasons. But definitely it’s easier in institutions to build consensus.

I doubt very much that we can go on talking about consensus-building measures, dynamics and strategies outside of formal institutions. Civil society plays a crucial role in Egypt in pushing forward the debate on different social, economic and political issues pertaining to the process of political change we are going through, but can it serve as a forum for consensus-building? To an extent. I can attest to that with regard to key legislative initiatives we had in the People’s Assembly, in the six months we were. For example, the legislative initiative on a new law for civil society and NGOs. Civil society played a crucial role in offering that venue. But in general, no, really it comes down to institutions, primarily to parliament, to build consensus and to enable political parties to negotiate and learn how to negotiate in real life. Otherwise we will continue to be stuck in the identity debate, which unfortunately Islamist actors benefit from. I’ll get back maybe later on to “Junior” Brown’s comment on does it reflect a true choice of Egyptians or not. Maybe we can get to that in the debate.

Nancy Okail: Just a little comment. We don’t have any problem with identities and ideologies with people identitying that for themselves. I think the problem is the lack of skills and ability in how to translate that into policy, and how to use the skills to pressure policymakers and to translate that into laws and legislation and being an effective operationalization tool. For example, at the time that Dr. Hamzawy mentioned, that we were debating the new law for the NGOs, we found it very difficult to find members of civil society who have the ability and the skills to formulate a policy paper or a policy brief and know how to persuade members of parliament with their view. So yes, some people have their views and identities but translating that and having that skill is missing and much needed in Egypt.

Question: I am Ibrahim Hussein, with the Alliance of Egyptian-Americans here in this country. My original question has been asked – you asked the question. Basically, how are these groups, the liberal-progressive organizations, collaborating and working with each other? From the response, I guess we can stand some improvement.

But my other question to the panel: anything the Egyptian-Americans in this country can do? What can we do to help in this movement toward moderation and democracy?

Question:  I’m George [indiscernible], now retired, but I was an executive director of the International Labor Organization in Geneva at the time of the uprising and traveled to Cairo soon afterwards in response to the government’s request that we help them redraft labor laws that would allow strikes and labor unions. Of course as workers exercised what they thought would be rights coming their way, the government had second thoughts about doing away with the Mubarak circumscribing of the labor unions. But none of you mentioned this as a mass movement – it’s inherently secular and crosses sectarian lines – even though the strikes played a major role in bringing down Mubarak. Professor Hamzawy, you did mention the absence of social and economic rights in the constitution that’s being drafted, and Dr. Okail, I’d be interested in your concept as well as to the role of the labor movement in civil society.

Question:  John Anderson, independent policy analyst. Also regarding particularly the Egyptian domestic legislative front and laws regarding political process and activity, what should be the role of the Egyptian society and political parties with regard to the controversy that is ongoing with regard to foreign financing of democracy and advocacy-type activities in Egypt, and/or direct funding of political parties? It’s an important question for a lot of reasons but particularly given the fact that there continue to be flows, not only governmental but private, from Gulf and other sources that are important to political activity in Egypt. What should be the position of political forces in Egypt, particularly civil society and advocacy organizations?

Nancy Okail:  I’ll try to have one answer combining mainly the two questions about the role of Egyptian-Americans here and the financing of foreign NGOs. There are two aspects here. One aspect is about awareness and ideology. One of the problems that I see we are facing here is that when the international community tries to put pressure on those who are taking over or governing Egypt right now and taking the role of drafting the constitution, in order to stress human rights articles, we always find the answer coming and saying: Yes, we appreciate that very much but Egypt has its own specificity and we have our own tradition and culture, and our culture does not allow for that. Of course this is a very general and vague answer but it’s very difficult to respond to.

I think Egyptian-Americans have a very important role to play to raise awareness of the importance of having rights and freedom and also to highlight that there is no sole speaker or anyone who can have a monopoly in deciding what is the tradition and culture of Egypt and how it is defined, and respond to that by having a voice that has the legitimacy to speak on behalf of the Egyptians.

On the second issue about the financing, I’m speaking particularly about the United States. The United States has not changed its way of engaging with the Egyptians before and after the revolution. They are still engaging and mainly talking from government to government. I think it’s about time – there is a huge debate now about whether to withhold aid in to pressure human rights and democracy principles or whether to keep on financing to make this government succeed in its role. But I think we are asking the wrong question. It’s not a matter of whether or not to engage with Egypt and whether or not to provide financing and funding, but the question is how and through which channels. I think it is very important to have civil society to civil society cooperation and also government to civil society, because these are people who are actually working on the ground. No matter which government we have in Egypt, if we keep on dealing with just the presidency or the people in power it will fail to actually proliferate and reach the people on the ground.

Nathan Brown:  I’ll leave the legislative and civil society questions and even the Egyptian-American question to others. Let me just say a couple brief comments about the question on the role of labor. Two comments.

One is that it seems to me that at the level of the overall macro-political process, the unhealthy imbalance that I was talking about had to do with the strong electoral weight of Islamists and the failure of other groups to really be able to build strong electoral constituencies. That’s a long-term process. Labor would be an obvious place to go and my sense is that one of the reasons why I think the Tunisian process might be a little healthier is simply because you’ve got a strong and viable labor movement there. That could emerge in Egypt but it’s going to take some time to take what has been a movement that has been growing up under very heavy state control and give a real kind of autonomous voice for workers. It’s an awful lot of internal housekeeping that has to take place within the labor movement.

The second thing I would say about that is that for a country that’s undergoing revolutionary change for the last year and a half, there’s been surprisingly little institutional and legal change in Egypt. There’s this incredible backlog of all these different groups and their legislative agenda. The military was actually fairly restrained in what it did in the legal realm. President Morsi has also – he has absolute legal authority, according to his own constitutional declaration; the only thing he needs for him to pass a law is for him just to say so and write it down on a piece of paper and send it off to the official gazette, it becomes law. Yet he’s been very restrained with that. So there’s this whole big legislative agenda that is out there and a lot of it does involve labor issues.

What I would expect is that when the new parliament is finally seated, you will see this backlog of complaint and every group in Egyptian society rushing to the parliament and trying to rush to the head of the legislative agenda. The days in which Egyptian society kind of presented itself as massed in public squares and coalesced around central demands, I think may be over. But the kind of contentious politics that we saw in the years leading up to the Egyptian revolution and the period since then are not over. Egyptians or particular constituencies in the society who do not get what they want now have a range of tools in terms of strikes and demonstrations and ways of pushing their agenda.

So I would guess the fact that labor has been a surprisingly silent actor so far may not be a permanent state. Whatever government takes over after the end of this very long and convoluted transition process will come under tremendous pressure, specifically on those kinds of issues.

Amr Hamzawy:  On social and economic rights and the role of labor, as Nathan has just mentioned, one of the great troubles that we have been facing in Egypt for the last two years now is that Egyptian politics and political debates have been pushed right after February 11, 2011, to the realm of identity and identity-debating. Read the references to the Islamic identity or to Egypt’s true identity – I’m rephrasing slogans which you will find in Egyptian debates. That identity turn of policy and political debates in Egypt has resulted in ignoring real issues on the ground. Some of them led to the revolution of January 25, 2011. Social and economic demands were at the forefront of factors and issues which brought people to Tahrir. In a way we imposed – and “we” here refers to the dominant group of actors within the political spectrum, which is the Islamist group of actors – they imposed an identity turn on the debate and led to the marginalization of social and economic issues and even to an engineering of a new political system in which we will have an environment conducive to the democratic transition. In a way we have spent a great time debating identity, as if Egypt was going to rediscover its true religious identity right after the revolution, as if Egypt was going to rediscover where it stands on issues pertaining to principles of shari’a, and as if those issues have not been consensus-based throughout the last years (apart from some groups here and there arguing for a different understanding). Imposing that identity turn on Egyptian politics led to the marginalization of social and economic rights and the draft constitution reflects that marginalization. It is a copy of the 1971 constitution – on labor issues, on education, on healthcare, on social safety networks, even on environmental issues. It is a document which is deprived of any creativity or innovation, four decades after the 1971 constitution was drafted. All of that is related to that identity turn which was imposed by Islamists.

So in a way, I’m quite reluctant to see what’s going on as simply an outcome of labor movements not having enough representation. No, this was a conscious attempt by actors on the ground – by Islamist actors, parties and movements – to impose that identity turn on Egyptian politics and to drive the discussion in a different direction than the one which led to the revolution and which was present in the different squares in Egypt throughout the eighteen days of the revolution. Unfortunately, the major outcome of that distorted political space is the draft constitution we are looking at and trying to rescue Egypt from its negative connotations and potential impacts.

Question: My name is [indiscernible], I’m a graduate student at the American University in US foreign policy. I have a follow-up question. You had mentioned, Nancy Okail, that the US was primarily engaging its aid and economic policies towards the government and it still continues to do that. Do you have any specific suggestions for how the US should in the future move forward with engaging with the general population, with civil society and with the public on the ground?

Question:  My name is Valerie [indiscernible], I’m a freelance journalist. I was wondering whether the panel could comment on the growing lawlessness in the Sinai and to what extent this is likely to threaten the stability both of Egypt and the surrounding region.

Question:  My name is [indiscernible] Mahmoud, with the American-Egyptian Strategic Alliance. My question is to Amr. You were very effective when you were in the parliament, even when the majority was Islamist. I hope you stay in the constitution committee to do the same. I was pleased with the return of [indiscernible] Moustapha, and to stay and work within the constitution. My question is: with the situation we have in Egypt now, is it the best if we can have a temporary constitution to serve Egypt for two years and then we move after that, after we have a stable Egypt, then [indiscernible]?

Question:  Alan Goulty, Wilson Center. In much of the Middle East, minorities are being squeezed out. I’m slightly surprised that no member of the panel has yet referred to the Coptic community in Egypt at all, unless under the rubric of Professor Brown the Younger’s “those who do not embrace an Islamist identity.” What do the panel think is the outlook for the Coptic community, with or without a new constitution? Are we to expect an acceleration of immigration or will they happily accept second-class status in the new Egypt?

Jonathan Brown:  First, I didn’t say Islamist, I said Islamic, just to clarify.

Khaled Elgindy:  Let’s take the remaining questions and then have a free-for-all. Go ahead.

Question:  My name is Mohammed [indiscernible], I’m a professorial lecturer at the American University. My question is for Dr. Okail but let me start really quickly with one point. The Islamists didn’t really win elections seven times, it’s a honeymoon after Mubarak’s fall. From 43 percent to 25 percent in the presidential elections. My question to Dr. Okail: what’s really troubling me these days is not really the draft of the constitution but certain policies and policy decisions. Five billion dollars from the IMF without really knowing the plan or the conditions. Speaking about reforming the tax structure without knowing what’s going on. The role of civil society in educating people and engaging people in public debates –

Khaled Elgindy:  What is the question, please?

Question:  The role of civil society in educating people and engaging people in public debate on the local level and the national level. What role is being played?

Question:  Amina [indiscernible] with the State Department. Thank you for a really interesting panel. I was wondering if members of the panel could speak to whether internal actors, both new and well-established, within Egypt can be effective in pressuring the Morsi administration toward both a decentralized, accountable government and an open, pluralistic civil environment. What specifically now needs to be done in the coming months and the next few years to actually realize the aspirations and demands behind the revolution?

Question:  Elaine Jones from the State Department. My question is directed primarily at Dr. Brown the Younger, but I’d appreciate comments from anyone else on the panel. You seemed very comfortable with the Supreme Tribunal basing its decisions and policies on shari’a. I want to ask you how you see that panning out on various issues – for example, domestic violence, where the Qur’an instructs a man that if his wife is disobedient he should admonish her, ban her from the bed and beat her. There are hadiths where –

Khaled Elgindy:  I’m sorry, I’m going to have to cut you off so we can answer, we have about seven minutes left. I think we got the gist of the question on how the shari’a will actually be implemented and the role of the Supreme Council on these issues.

Jonathan Brown:  I’ll answer two questions. The first is on the role of religious minorities, especially Coptic Christians. When we talk about identity politics, it takes two to tango. It’s not just Islamists who are saying “identity politics, identity politics.” Other people who tell them we can’t change the constitution at all to make it any more Islamic, even in its connotations, that’s just as much identity politics. A number of Islamist thinkers in Egypt have come up with very viable, convincing arguments for how you can allow Christians or women or anybody to hold positions of authority, even head of state, and still have a shari’a-compliant legal system. Their ideas should be put into the debate with other more conservative Islamist ideas. I think they probably will eventually win. I think eventually you will have an understanding of shari’a law which allows Christians or women to be president of Egypt.

I think the way to guarantee that that does not happen is to get up and keep telling Egyptians that they can’t have more public commitment of [indiscernible] to Islam. I think this is one of the things that has led to the power of Islamists over the years, is consistently an elite with a different lifestyle telling the majority of the people that they don’t have the right to have a role in forming the country’s legal and political identity. As long as that creates identity politics and as long as that’s the case, you don’t actually have the space for more moderate and still viable Islamic ideas to come forward and convince people and lead to a system in which minorities and Muslims actually have completely equal status before the law.

And things like the Islamists didn’t really win seven elections – okay, I don’t know. I’m a democrat. Not the Democratic Party, I believe in democracy. You can sit and say Barack Obama didn’t really win the election, the American people are just in some kind of haze or false consciousness or something, but the fact of the matter is that polls speak and you have to listen.

On the issue of – I think you mean the Supreme Constitutional Court? I don’t know what the Supreme Council is, unless this is some weird movie and there’s some council that makes these decisions. I’m talking about the Supreme Constitutional Court, which is the body under the Mubarak era and until today which actually would define and decide whether or not a certain law or piece of legislature is compatible with the shari’a. That’s what I was speaking about.

Nathan Brown:  Just two remarks that build on things that have already been said. When you’re approaching debates about the role of the Islamic shari’a in Egypt, I think if you focus on these generalities you’re going to get one kind of result. The simple fact is that the phrase “Islamic shari’a” has very positive resonance for most Egyptians – not for all Egyptians, but for most of them. So the real question in terms of legal and constitutional engineering has to focus on particular structures and who has authority to do what. That’s why you have to take a look at what the provision is for Al-Azhar. As Amr says, it’s given some advisory role. In my mind it’s in a very strong advisory role. It would be very difficult for Al-Azhar to take a position and for a politician to say, “Al-Azhar says that but I disagree.” But the question is, then how is Al-Azhar brought into the debate? Who has the authority to call on them? Who within Al-Azhar speaks? How is Al-Azhar organized? If the constitutional court is going to continue to play a role, who is going to be sitting? How are justices going to be appointed to that court? Those are the really nitty-gritty questions that I think really need an awful lot more attention.

The second thing I will say is about the performance of Islamists in elections. I’m Nathan Brown, I’m not Nate Silver, so I can’t really make great electoral predictions – but I will anyway. My sense is that if Egyptians who are opposed to the Islamists think that they can go into elections and they won’t have to deal with Islamists afterwards, they’re going to have a series of very bad – Egyptian politics will seem like a series of very bad dreams. My guess is that they’re there to stay. They are unavoidable. They are a part of the political system. Whether they will realize majorities in every race, I do not know, but I think it is quite possible. Hoping that they will go away is not a very effective way to deal with it.

I don’t actually read the presidential election results quite the same way. When you go to parliamentary elections, the simple fact is that when you look at how parliamentary elections are organized and the strong role for organizational presence in the various ways of various systems that are being talked about for parliamentary elections in Egypt, you’re likely to see an awful lot of Islamists. Maybe not a majority but you’re going to see an awful lot of Islamists in the coming parliament.

Amr Hamzawy:  While I definitely agree that when polls speak we have to respect them – otherwise we are not looking at a set of democratic rules of the game – and I do agree that recent elections which took place in Egypt throughout the last eighteen months and more do attest to the fact that Islamists have a considerable weight on the ground, have considerable social and political capital, and they put it forward in elections – in parliamentary as well as presidential elections – successfully. That should not be contested. If you are interested in building a democracy in Egypt, where we are fighting as of now for the constitution and the frame of reference for that working democracy, we have to respect the polls. So I’m not wondering about that and I’m not questioning that. I believe it’s much better for liberal politicians and parties to stop doubting the results of the ballot box. They need to be respected.

However, I am completely against confusing the Islamic identity of Egypt and political Islam. I am completely against confusing Islamists and the Islamic identity of Egypt. And to suggest that simply what political Islamists put forward by means of interpreting and understanding what the Islamic identity of Egypt is, and to translate it politically into a push for a constitution that abides more by shari’a, I’m not sure what that means. If the constitution refers to principles of shari’a as a prime source of legislation, I’m not sure what that “more of shari’a in the constitution” would mean. I’m definitely against confusing the Islamic identity, which should not be, and unfortunately that identity turn of Egyptian politics which we have been suffering from throughout the last two years has come about by means of pushing forward such arguments, confusing political Islam and their agendas and their platforms with the Islamic identity. And accusing liberal politicians and actors of not abiding by Islamic identity when they oppose political Islam and their platforms. That needs to stop. Otherwise we will continue to have a messy political debate which is taking us nowhere, a debate in which social and economic rights are marginalized, a debate in which the engineering of the political system is being dealt with in such an undemocratic manner that we will have a president once again with vast executive prerogatives and authorities, as if we did not learn from the last six decades of presidential despotism in Egypt.

So it needs to be stopped, the confusion of Islamic identity and that one grand narrative of political Islamists, that “we speak in the name of Islamic identity” – they do not. They are not the only actors on the ground. Even if liberals are weak in elections, Islamists are not the only actors on the ground and they do not claim that one absolute claim of truth in the name of Islamic identity they speak. They do not. It needs to be stopped.

Secondly, I’m referring to a discussion which we have been having in Egypt – I get, not shocked, but negatively surprised when in a way ideas, with all due respect of legal authorities such as [indiscernible], are pushed forward as my colleague Younger Brown said. If they were to compete with Salafi ideas or more conservative ideas of Islamists, those enlightened ideas are bound to win – no. That’s not the case. In debates, maybe. But in politics, of course not. In politics you have to look for actors, you have to look for parties and platforms and who wins elections. And what has been put forward so far is a considerably conservative understanding of Islam, religion and politics.

Nathan referred to Article 4 in the constitution, on Al-Azhar. Once again, there are many questions. If Al-Azhar’s role is advisory, fine. Can a politician, as Nathan rightly said, stand up and say “I am against an advice coming from Al-Azhar”? What are we enshrining and stipulating in the constitution? Even by not mandating the institution which will consult Al-Azhar – the reference in the current article is simply “you can take and Al-Azhar’s advice is to be taken.” Who? Who will go to Al-Azhar? A lawyer who would like to divorce a couple? An institution, the judicial branch of government or the legislative branch of government? Unless we move beyond the generalities of Islamism and Islamic identity and not confusing them, we are getting nowhere.

Final comment, on Egyptian-Americans. Because I’m here – I was in Harvard three days ago. Before I entered this room, an Egyptian friend of mine living here in the US and working here did show me a newspaper of tomorrow, in Egypt one of the dailies that we have, in which an Islamist fellow is attacking me after my lecture in Harvard, saying that I said strange words about Islamists. So to give you a sense of what Egyptian-Americans need to do: A) be aware that you are being monitored; B) be aware that whatever you say is relevant; C) be aware that Egypt’s battles on the constitution, on its civil identity, on the Islamic identity which is not contested – and what we are seeing is the politicization of identities that should not be part of political debates, because it’s there and no one’s questioning it – that what we have in Egypt is going to be settled domestically, locally. What I am saying here is exactly what I say in Egypt. Unless we manage to get a better constitution for Egypt, in which the mixture of religion and politics is not taken for granted, in which clear boundaries are defined to protect the state’s nature, in which prerogatives of authority of the president are checked and balanced with a powerful and vibrant parliament, we are not delivering on what Egyptians demanded on January 25, 2011.

Khaled Elgindy:  Thank you. Obviously there is a lot more to be said on this issue but I’m afraid we’re completely now out of time. We didn’t get to our last speaker. In any case, please join me in thanking our distinguished speakers.

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