Role for religion in Egypt's constitution

After months of fierce debate over the place of Islam in government, the assembly drafting a new constitution for Egypt has settled on a compromise that opens the door to more religion in governance but mainly guarantees that the issue will continue to roil politics, the Parliament and the courts for many years to come.

The compromise would insert religion more deeply into the legislative and judicial process by elaborating new guidelines to interpret “the principles of Islamic law” that the old constitution had recognised, at least nominally, as the main source of Egyptian legislation.

But the new constitution would also leave the final authority to apply those principles with the elected Parliament and civil courts, making the long-term consequences hard to foresee. If literal-minded ultraconservatives – known as Salafis and who hold about a quarter of the seats in Parliament – gain more influence in the legislature and eventually the courts, they could someday use the provisions to try to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

But by keeping power in the hands of elected officials and civil courts, the agreement should also dispel, for now, the fears here and in the West that Egypt might follow the path of Iran’s 1979 revolution toward a theocracy where religious leaders have the final say on all matters of state. And liberal delegates who signed onto the deal noted that the guidelines were broad enough to leave substantial room for debate over just what Islamic law should require in the context of modern Egypt.

Deal details

As the largest Arab state and the original home of the international Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt has become a bellwether for Islamist political movements around the region after the Arab Spring. Although many Muslim-majority countries acknowledge Islam in their charters, Egypt would become the first Arab state to seek to meld democracy with the principles of Islamic law, or Shariah. Although the full terms  of the deal have not been released, several liberals and Islamists involved in the negotiations described its details.
Delegates on both sides called the deal a victory. Younis Makhyoun, a Salafi leader in the constitutional assembly who signed the deal, argued that it would “prevent random people from coming up with new schools of thought and claiming they’re part of Shariah.”

Echoing the liberals’ fears, Makhyoun suggested that someday the provisions might even be used for strict enforcement of puritanical Islamic moral codes, including stoning adulterers or cutting off the hands of thieves. But outside the assembly many on both sides denounced the deal as a sellout. On Friday, thousands of Salafis filled Tahrir Square to protest that the drafts did not go far enough.

While liberals in the assembly argued that they had beaten back Salafi proposals for a council of religious scholars that could strike down legislation, many activists outside were angry that the constitution appeared for the first time to take Shariah so seriously. “The road to Afghanistan,” said Malek Adly, a liberal activist. Although the old constitution had recognised the “principles of Islamic law” after a 1980 revision, its texts hardly mattered under the old secular autocracy.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has dominated the elections since the uprising, argues that Shariah only “polishes morals, through persuasion and education, with no coercion whatsoever” as the group’s supreme guide, Mohamed Badie, said last week in a statement supporting the deal. “Shariah totally rejects the concept of a theocracy.”

Straining to present some semblance of consensus, Brotherhood leaders helped bring together representatives of the liberal and Salafi camps, along with officials from Egypt’s Coptic Church, for at least three six-hour negotiating sessions before they signed the compromise.

The agreement stipulates that in personal matters Christians and Jews are free to follow their own religious teachings. And it provides that on questions related to Islamic law, the Parliament or the courts can seek the nonbinding advice of scholars at Al Azhar, the center of Sunni Muslim scholarship set to become independent of state control.

In the end, scholars said, the real impact of the new provision – defining “principles of Shariah” according to established Sunni Muslim thought – would be to move the battle over the application of Islamic law further into the terrain of religious scholarship.

Conservatives feel more comfortable there, said Clark Lombardi, a professor at the University of Washington Law School who studies the role of Islamic law in the legal systems. But “liberal Islamists” in Egypt and elsewhere are also becoming increasingly effective at building their own cases on the basis of Shariah for women’s rights or other causes.

“The battle between liberals and conservatives,” Lombardi said, “is just going to reappear.”