Does Egypt Need the Muslim Brotherhood to Become a Religious State?

Despite the curtain having been drawn by parliament on the crisis triggered by Farouk Hosni, Minister of Culture’s, statement against the veil, the repercussions of the crisis are still casting a shadow on the Egyptian cultural and political scene. Intellectuals have since then warned of what they described as the Muslim Brotherhood’s project to create a religious state in Egypt partly by exploiting the aftermath of the crisis of the veil. The ramifications of this crisis were discussed in a panel organised by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies as part of its Ibn Rushd Salon on the 5th of December 2005 and entitled: “ The Veil Crisis or the Civil State: Does Egypt Need the Muslim Brotherhood to Become a Religious State?”
Salah Eissa, Editor in Chief of Al Qahira newspaper, said that the Muslim Brotherhood are playing a role in creating social and popular pressure force in Egypt to create a religious state, explaining that a religious state is one which is biased in its legislation, functions and organizations towards following a particular religion of its subjects. He also mentioned that it is not only the Muslim Brotherhood that is the proponent of such a state, but also extremist Islamist movements in Egypt, and accused the Brotherhood and these movements of attempting to exploit and use other members of society.
Eissa called on the Brotherhood’s parliament members, and who he called their supporters from the National Democratic Party, to call for legislation in parliament that imposes the veil and its related Islamic Sharia rulings on all Egyptian women, accusing everyone, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the government MPs, opposition members, independents and the media of commercialising and trading in religion in order to gain more votes in their respective electoral divisions.
Eissa accused the Brotherhood of presenting ambiguous slogans and programs, and said they were responsible for the fact that the door of Ijtihad has still not been opened in Egypt since it was closed in the fourth century after the Hijra. He said that they were in charge of presenting their own ijtihad that would enable them to exist on the map of a modern, civil state. He also stated his opposition to the idea of electing the Sheikh of Al Azhar, explaining that if this were to happen, the Azhar would become a religious authority, whereas its main function is to take on Ijtihad and scientific research.
Eissa stressed that the Minister of culture has denied what statements were credited to him including that he would create out of his ministry a wall of opposition against the spread of the veil, verifying this with the fact that the veiled female employees in the ministry are not discriminated against. He also said that this commercialisation of religion should be worrying to Muslims, and that those who bring up things like veiled women’s lack of access to television presenter jobs on Egyptian television do not take into account that such jobs are not suitable for those who wear the veil.
Eissa also questioned the nature of religious authority in the state that the Muslim Brotherhood envision, would it be the Azhar, or their own Guidance Office?
On his part, Dr. Gaafar Abd El Salam a member of the Islamic Research Academy and the secretary general of the Islamic Universities Association tackled the conditions of the declaration of the second article of the constitution concerning the issue of Islamic Sharia. He said that some judges have tried to apply this article literally to legal cases, however, the Supreme Constitutional Court was of the view that this article is not binding to judges and only applies to legislators who need to observe the general principles of Sharia when issuing legislation.
Abd El Salam continued saying that there is a consensus in Islam that the veil is one of the rituals related to faith, and its observance is part of faith, linking this with human rights declarations which state the right to freedom of religion and practice of religious rituals. He added that it has not happened in Islamic history that the veil has been forced on anyone.
He also mentioned the divergence between the Sunnis and Shiites concerning the concept of the religious state, where while Shiites incorporate the idea of the guardianship of the jurist, Sunnis have no similar concept. Abd El Salam stressed the fact that the notion of a religious state does not exist in Islam, which gives the people and the nation the right to choose their representatives. Dr. Abd El Salam also expressed his view that the Muslim Brotherhood do not want to create a religious state. Abd El Salam explained that what created the fuss regarding the veil, was the Minister of Culture’s description of it as backward and regressive, and that the Muslim Brotherhood saw this as a chance to catch the minister off guard, since they represent the political opposition to the minister’s party. Abd El Salam concluded by describing the whole controversy as trivial, saying that it should not have been exaggerated.
Dr. Mustafa El Fiqy, president of the foreign relations committee in the People’s Assembly said that the veil crisis in Egypt was an expression of a wider crisis of freedom. He explained that the Minister of Culture is also an artist, whose sense of beauty comes before his sense of justice; however, he did violate the freedoms of others through his statements about the veil. At the same time, the minister was exposed to aggressive attacks from his opponents resembling a form of intellectual terrorism. El Fiqy pointed to the fact that the minister’s own party members, the NDP deputies, were the first to launch such attacks and explained that the danger was this attempt to deluge the electoral street, pre-empting the opposition at the cost of ignoring an important social and developmental issue, that being the issue of freedom.
El Fiqy pointed to what he described as the suffocation of freedoms in the Arab world, and the absence of tolerance and a normal dialogue space. He also stated that the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Banna, had a wide space for dialogue and did not label people apostates, indicating that there are many Islamic teachings and obligations which are not carried out, at their forefront, the obligation to think.
El Fiqy said that it must be acknowledged that a religious wave has started to dominate the Arab and Islamic worlds. His explanation for this is the increased sentiment shared among Muslims of the need to search for their identity, and their rejection of what is going on around them in the world in the form of events which target the Islamic world, making Muslims constitute 80% of the world’s refugees. He also criticised the Muslim side for what he described as being hypersensitive towards anything that touches upon the Muslim faith and criticized the current Sheikh of Al Azhar Dr. Sayyid Tantawy for making unsuitable statements on various occasions, including the veil crisis in France and the Prophet Muhammad cartoon crisis. He said that the religious institution as represented in Al Azhar is weak, its reactions late, and ambiguous when they do come. He said this was due to the fact that the institution was functionally chained down because of the appointment of its head, as well as due the fact that it has stopped sending delegations to learn abroad. El Fiqy highlighted the Minister of Culture’s efforts to restore Islamic monuments, and that he is not an enemy of Islam, but was simply unlucky in the wording of his statements, criticising the exaggerated and radical responses to the minister’s statements, and praising the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood for declaring that the issue had gotten more attention than it deserved.
On his part Sobhy Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood MP described the veil crisis as a crisis of verbal abuse. The minister insulted the veil which is a matter which has already been decided by Islamic Sharia, and is not a matter up for discussion or debate as well as its being a part of social behaviour. Saleh stated that it was not the Muslim Brotherhood who took the debate to the People’s Assembly, but the minister himself who declared that his ministry would become a wall of opposition against the veil, overstepping his official capacity. Saleh pointed to the fact that the head of parliament received 150 urgent memorandums concerning the minister’s declarations, meaning that it was not only the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputies involved in this, but also deputies from the ruling NDP. He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputies addressed the unconstitutionality of the minister’s declarations and his use of phrases that went beyond the bounds of public decency.
Saleh declared that the intensity of the reaction to the minister’s statements came as a result of an unprecedented level of hatred towards the ruling party and its ministers, as well as the Minister of Culture’s controversial persona. He stated that some people were triggered by the minister’s statements, others by their hatred of the ruling party, and others by the Minister of Media and Information’s refusal to employ veiled TV presenters, despite their obtaining of court orders in their favour.
Saleh reiterated that the Muslim Brotherhood are calling for a civil state with Islamic terms of reference, in accordance with the principles of Sharia and not Fiqh.
He continued that they do not call for a religious state, confirming this with various literature issued by the Brotherhood which ensures that the source of legitimacy and authority are the people.
Saleh stated that the kind of reference in Islam is not determined by the Muslim Brotherhood or, in fact, anyone at all, since there are principles in religion which do not need determination by anyone since they are fixed givens which pre-exist the Muslim Brotherhood, and will remain after the Muslim Brotherhood have gone. He also said that it was wrong to compare this to the Shiite state, since Sunnis do not believe in the incorruptibility of the Imam or in the guardianship of the jurist.
Bahiy El Din Hassan, director of Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, disagreed that passing remarks made by a minister concerning personal freedom should turn into a public cause for debate and invade the agenda of the parliament. He said that the religious has become our reference for discussing all other issues and wondered what the relationship between the minister’s remarks and his declaration about the creation of a committee for religious affairs in his ministry following the crisis was.
Hassan also expressed his fear that discussing the issue of the veil in the way in which it was done, would have a lasting effect on the issue of freedom in Egypt. He stressed that the veil is a personal issue, coming down to personal beliefs, adding that some of the statements made against the Minister of Culture in the People’s Assembly should not even have been uttered in a closed room. Hassan continued that the minister of culture faced accusations of apostasy and treachery in a society where everyone knows that such accusations could lead to the death of the accused. He also said that the religious state is that which has a governor who believes that its affairs are managed through divine guidance, and does not have to be run by religious scholars, adding that some studies define Egypt as a constitutional religious state.
Hassan declared that the problem is not in the sayings or intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood when it states that it does not call for a religious state, but the problem is the ascending role of the religious institution in the Egyptian political scene.
In comments from the audience, some wondered as to who was responsible for the weakness of the religious institutions, while others noted that the NDP was one upping the Brotherhood during the veil crisis so it would not be called a secular party, and others asked why the Brotherhood did not raise a similar outcry when the Salam 98 ferry disastrously sunk.