Egypt's Bizarre Islamist Constitution

Late on November 29^th, 2012, after sixteen hours of debate, President Muhammad Morsi and Egypt’s Constituent Assembly, signed into law a new national constitution, with 294 provisions.  Islamic law remains the law of the land, as it was before.  But this rise of the clergy, hijacking the 2011 Egyptian revolution, using foreign (Saudi) money to vote themselves into most offices, is unprecedented.

The Islamist constitution did not evolve through consultation between parties. It does not recognize the equality of women before the law. Furthermore, it puts restrictions on where women are to work. Egypt's Copts are alarmed, because the new constitution offers no guarantees that their rights will be honored.
Morsei showed his colors by simply announcing that we was seizing, usurping, all power, bypassing the courts and violating Egypt's existing laws. CC an you imagine what he would do to Egypt if he had his way?

"Allah favors the Muslim clergy so gives the top clergyman absolute power." This is wrong, un-Islamic, and quite against the grain of Bedouin politics. Some western social scientists, realizing that early 'primitive' societies generally elect their leaders and that these leaders are immediately accessible, call this time-honored nomadic (and town) way 'primitive democracy.' But it is real democracy, ancestral to all Arabs. 

Authenticity in Arabia and in all Arab countries, derives from the long traditions of the Bedouin: Compromise, reconciliation, petitions, show-your hands referendums, the just settlement of legal disputes, the payment of damages - all this was second nature to Arab ancestors.

Readers of this blog know how we feel about the relation between democracy and Islam: they are compatible. "Government must consult with the people at every step."

 Bedouin sheykhs sought consensus, but recognized the validity of opposition:  “My people will not agree on an error”  - Muhammad.
After Muhammad's death in 632 CE, Abu Bakr was elected Khalifa (successor) by the various ulemas (learned elders). After his assassination, Omar was elected khalifa. After him, Uthman, and Ali - all elected. Muhammad left no instructions, no texts, but we can be certain that he set up the election of the khalifa.

Elections, petitions, audiences, lobbying, legal claims and challenges, diplomacy between tribes, tolerance of non-Muslims - these are elements in Arabia's traditional democracies.
But one can fully understand why the Ikhwan (the Brothers) go for it. Their organization was illegal from 1954 to 2011. Their ideology and their texts, like the new constitution, shows no tolerance, no compromise, and redress of grievances, and no recourse to courts, except for the Islamic courts he'll be setting up, over time, in all neighborhoods and towns.

If the prophet Muhammad returned, to conduct interviews with various sorts of people, would he recognize the Muslim leaders? By dress, yes, but not from spirit or law. Muhammad had no use for any use for a clergy. Though he had a legal background, as a mediator, he was no universal law giver. He limited his changes, his reforms, to just a few areas: women's rights, to stop infanticide, to elect of officers from the bottom up (by merit), the guarantee of rights to non-Muslims, and the many prohibitions against harm, even during war. 

Muhammad was a humble man, averse to any assumptions. So when God and Her Angel tell him that he is not a teacher or world conqueror, but one who warns...

Islam was a search for the living truth inside, a method for psychological growth and discovery. The original revelations are lost because they were never really studied. Never use one's piety to assume you are better than others. We must not forget that the Islamists are not educated in the 'western' social sciences. Morsi was trained as an engineer, benefitted greatly from his stay in the US. As an engineer he has not been exposed to Euro-American democratic theory and practice.

A referendum is to be held December 15, to get the people's approval. Saudi monies will no doubt continue to percolate through the society. But opposition is increasing. Those protesting in Tahrir Square are secular people, most educated, some writers and intellectuals. Morsi is a tough religious bigot, famous for not compromising with all those he considers non-Islamic. Of course he knows full well the hideous assassination campaigns implemented by the Muslim Brothers, from 1929 to 201l.

Mid November featured another mini-war between Gaza's Hamas and Israel. Morsi walked a narrow line, hosting ceasefire negotiations. The Israelis did not invade.

The Palestinians won for itself a new status at the UNO, as an observer state, while Israel in return, cuts Palestinian dues and announces the expansion of East Jerusalem Israeli settlements. Primary elections in Israel last week saw Bibi 'the whiner' Netanyahu, move further to the right, joining Avidor Lieberman's fascist racist bid to drive the Arabs out of all of Palestine. Lieberman goes down in a flurry of corruption charges. As foreign minister, he thought he could 'accelerate' the annexation of Arab lands. The American government is acquiescing, as usual.

Dissension erupts inside the MB hierarchy, over who gets what. Can the MB moderates hold down the hot heads? The extremists will just form their own secret cells and plot as they did before.

The MB is already engaging the Israelis. HAMAS is MB.  Obviously, the leaders of Egypt do a disservice to their nation if they are distracted by arming and plotting war vs. Israel, Europe, and the USA. But can the new Islamist government survive just talking tough to Israel?

Instead of addressing domestic needs, the Arab states gang up on Israel. This lets the extremists in Israel take advantage of the hidden dissensions and contradictions inherent in Islamist politics, to eat its own twin – Arab Palestine.

Even more sordid than the greedy ignorant Islamists are those self-defined ‘christian’ American Zionists who back the Israeli right’s military solution – to cleanse the land. That the victims, the dispossessed, should include some 600,000 Palestinian Christians, does not even register with these Americans.

It is easy to see how hatred of Jews, Christians and secular Muslims has precluded justice and prosperity in much of the Islamic world.  Religious hatred is no stranger to 'christians,' be they Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant. The hatred has 'flavors' typical of each. The popes, for example, launched 62 'crusades' or tried to, killing some 15 million. What does God think about the children of Abraham threatening genocide against innocents? She's an angry Mother, as the struggle is degrading millions of lives.

If Jerusalem were holy, it would and could be easily shared...but, with the financial support of American Zionists, Christian and Jewish, we should expect the very worst. Psychiatric wards in Israel are full of American crazies trying to spark 'the Final Day rapture.' Fortunately today the US and USSR are not liable to go to war over the Holy Land, as they were, from 1964 to 1991. (trip-wire nuclear war which would have ended human life on earth.)

So here we are, surrounded by religious nuts, people with wealth or power, who have no shame.  They hold their ancient texts to be the only guide. Why not just open your eyes?

Perhaps the most relevant aspect of the new Muslim fundamentalist governments is that their members are incompetent, not being educated. Without critical thinking and consensus-building, the government will lack the informed specialists required to put the economy back together. So we expect Morsi to be voted out of office in 2015.

Yathrib, or Al Medina, ‘the city,’ was Muhammad’s refuge and his think tank, for some eight years.  None of the citizens were Muslims but animists and Jews, with some Christians, too. Not just from Palestine, but from Yemen as well (and Ethiopia). All kinds of regulations had to be promulgated, to protect minorities, and it is these laws which actually made the Shari’a and fiqh work.

Unfortunately, a few bad laws crept back in. One might think they would have been quickly excised, as they prevent the world from accepting the Shari’a. But no: the mistakes have become permanent fixtures, masquerading as Islamic law.

The Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) and the Salafis have a rather narrow, uncritical approach to the Shari’a.  Today’s Muslim parties have little of the grace and tolerance and mercy and intellectual curiosity characteristic of their predecessors. 

Fiqh was always taught alongside the Shari’a.  Fiqh was, is, the logical processes of jurisprudence:  determining guilt, compensating the victim, punishing the criminal(s).  Fiqh is the logic underlying a judicial case.

A, Islamic law graduate is a mujtahid, i.e., one who struggles (to find a just ruling).  Ijtihad is the method of struggle. Fiqh  explains how to use precedent, analogy and logic to apply the Shari’a and fiqh to specific crimes and misdemeanors. Discrimination against non-Muslims, or women, or abusing g prisoners of war, or war as punishment, goes against God's wish. In fact, it is all a mockery of God’s message.

"If you use my name to cause evil, I will tear you limb from limb." (Exodus 20:7) 

 The MB muftis know some Arabic and some have at their disposal the original treatises by Malik ibn Anas and Abu Hanifa Numa. Like the Wahhabis in Saudia, they take Ahmed Ibn Hanbal (780-855) as the source of their teachings. But Ibn Hanbal was not an extremist. In fact, I remember reading (in Arabic, as he has never been translated into a European tongue) a passage from Ahmed ibn Hanbal which I recorded. It goes like this:  "Verily God does not consider your appearance or your wealth, but looks at your heart and your actions." He also warns against "praying before others - to be seen." Islam is an interior search, not nearly so superficial. It is about being in the presence of God. Will you want worldly wealth and power then? No, by God, for She effaces the ego (nafs)."  

Most Muslims are told that the 'Door of Interpretation' was closed in the 12th C. But, paradoxically, Ahmed ibn Hanbal kept, keeps, it open. So it is highly paradoxical that the Wahhabis, the Brothers, and the Salafis represent a tradition claiming to be open to new legislation. Maybe secular leaders can use Hanbal to coax the radical Islamists back into civil society.

From my own interviews with 'leading' mullahs, imams and muftis, in the Levant, Persia and in Central Asia (including Russia and Pakistan), only a few clergy demonstrated a critical approach, able to rule against fanaticism. "The is no fanaticism (ta'assob) in Islam." (M).

Yet still we hear of weird customs, like the stoning of adulterers, and the cutting off of hands and the gouging out of eyes, not mention beheadings and maiming, even of other Muslims.

The first, stoning, is an old Hebrew custom, well attested in both Old and New Testaments. The cutting of hands and gouging out of eyes, is a foolish reading of Christ’s injunction: “If thy right hand offends thee, cut it off. If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out.” The veiling of women was an upper class Babylonian custom carried forward by Byzantine Christiandom, enforced by the male clergy. India, too, has these issues. Restrictions on women’s rights, education and mobility, definitely goes against the prophet’s practice in Mecca, Medina, and later, in Mecca again.

The point is that Muslim muftis and imams cannot use the Shari’a, or get non-Muslims to respect it, until they excise the bad un-Islamic laws that crept into it. These have no basis in the Qur’an or in Muhammad’s rulings.  They discredit the entire juridical tradition and method. Once these errors are corrected, then the world will respect Islamic law - if its texts are ever translated into a Western language. Fat chance..

“The letter of the law killeth the spirit of the law.”  Unscrupulous clergy bent on power manipulate the law for their own narrow ends. We see that in the so-called Judaeo-Christian traditions as well. In Hinduism and even in Buddhism.

IN CONCLUSION -

Now today we are witnessing proof of the fact that the original ‘Arab Spring’ has been successfully taken over by narrow mock-Muslim clerics and political leaders babbling about Higher Things they know nothing about. Shamelessly these men have used Islam to cement their power and influence. It should not surprise us that they know little history, or even know the history of their own faith. As for the high discipline of comparative religions, forget it.

These Islamist are fundamentalists who worship a book and a man, Muhammad, even though the Qur’an tells us that Muhammad was just a warner, not even a teacher, no less a conqueror.  To worship him is to associate God with a man, like the Christians do. But that was not the original way.

One reason the West is so powerless to influence change, is that it knows not the living traditions of Islam: the various Sufi traditions, plus, more closely, and politically, the 19th century Muslim traditon of reform. In the mid 19^th C. it rose from the injustices of colonialism. Its progenitor was Jalal ad Din al Afghani (Asadabadi), who traveled west and ended up working with M. Abdu on a newspaper called Al Minar, the Lighthouse, in Paris. Allegedly al Afghani made this statement:

“I traveled in the East. I found many Muslims but no Islam. I traveled in the West. I found no Muslims but I found Islam.” 

Which is more authentically Christian or Muslim? A secular state that provides for its poor and elderly, and educates its young to think critically. Or a self-promoting clerical regime that can’t respect  basic human rights or can’t keep the country together?  

Governments now do the work of religions, providing education, healing, relief for the destitute, scientific info, without forcing citizens to think in a specific mythic or ideological fashion.

Humans are not animals. Animals are made perfect, perfectly adapted to their environmental niches. Humans are, after adolescence, self-creating organisms. Neuroscience has confirmed the truth that we are all unique. Cultural pressures to conform may seal off the spirit. The human psyche is of course split. The little ego-consciousness loses the ability to communicate with its deeper, more conscious ‘other half’ – the so-called Unconscious, which of course is the real consciousness.

The great prophets and spiritual teachers were humble men and women who never wanted us to worship them, or follow them. They wanted each of us to have the chance to develop the powers that they themselves enjoyed. All growth of essence comes at the expense of personality. Essence cannot talk, so liturgies and scriptures miss the point. Certainly one is lost if he or she uses a religion, a faith to strengthen ego or to bear grudges against innocent non-Muslims or against Muslims of other sects.

The Egyptian president does not control the military.  Women and children fail to attain equal rights, deviating from Muhammad’s  practice at Medina.  Freedom of religion - but also the primacy of Islam.  It seems that Pres. Morsi avoided a big showdown with the secular, educated, competent citizens by conceding to the Consultative Assembly. Egypt will have one house of parliament. The majority – Sunni Muslims – will dominate by electing people who use Islam to reinforce their egos.

Western observers are horrified at the entrenchment of political Islam in Egypt, but have made little effort understanding Islam. The Shari’a and fiqh are disparaged. Certain inhumane regulations crept back into the founding corpus of written law.

Though Muhammad had a background in jurisprudence, unwritten desert law, he did not assume to be any universal law giver.

His contributions were new laws guaranteeing women the freedom to choose a mate, to divorce, to inherit, to be free of physical and verbal abuse. Non-Muslims are to be respected. There should be no compulsion, no coercion in religion. No exposing to death female babies.  As for the doctrine of Jihad, it rose later, after Muhammad had passed (632 AD).  The Qur’an expresses no theory of war,. Those verses mentioning war are warnings against ‘mischief and corruption’ and setting down how prisoners of war are to be treated. Nor is there any call to war in the reputable ahadith.

Al Qaidah, the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood point to a few sentences where Muhammad curses non-Muslims and bids his followers to fight. In the Qur’an there are some three or four verses where God or Angel Gabriel, tells Muhammad to fight and kill the infidels and the hypocrites. One can easily understand Muhammad said this things reactively, in the heat of battle, or under threat of assassination. Those nearby remembered the statements, so they became canonical.

Two years ago, in Algeria, Berber Tuaregs in Tindouf, far in the south, members of the refugee POLISARIO, started immolating themselves after some 6 months of continual protests. The news was picked up by Algerian radio stations and bloggers, triggering more immolations, as well as confrontation outside Algiers, between an amorphous group of discontents, including many women and educated people, and the regime’s specially trained riot police. The rest is history. Tunisia lit up, then Egypt. In Yemen, demonstrators filled the streets. 

Syria seemed to stand above waves of aspiration and deprivation, but come spring 2012, starting in the far south, at historic Dera’a, private citizens began attacking the secret police. The authorities overreacted, killing their own citizens. The civil war was on.

 Now, after the deaths of fifty thousand, the civil war rages around Aleppo, Damascus and Homs, Hama and Dei az Zaur, in the east, on the Euphrates. 

Back in September, Al Asad started using fighter bombers and attack helicopters to bomb apartment complexes. So the Free Syrian army along with diverse Sunni militants and some Christian and Shi’i dissidents, are trying to take or disable military airfields. At the moment, the regime is trying to clear the road from the big international airport east of Damascus, to the city’s center.

Iraq is a basket case. Shi'i take bombs hits just  a block or two from the mosque at Kerbala, while the Kurds have signed deals with foreign oil firms in defiance of Baghdad.'

Kuwait holds elections on Dec, 1st, with victory going to the pro-government parties. The Islamists have tried to use their old male hierarchies to defame and block secular royalists. It's the same old Muslims Brotherhood. Their fixations on outer things, like their robes and beards, precludes any penetrating self-analysis. For example, mullahs and imams may have heard the names of the seven different kinds of land-ownership in the Shari'a, no Muslim cleric (or western anthropologist) has analyzed those seven forms as an 'arrangement' - we'll not say 'system.' That's a modern term, taken from the Greek.

Bahrain is another case where a demonstration by secular, educated younger people, for simple democratic equality, was usurped by Irani-charged Shi’i imams, now advocating for the overthrow of the Sunni regime.  Earlier reforms had opened the parliament to elected Shi’i representatives, but these were unable to influence events. Most left their offices.

Many fine, sane, educated people in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world, are now finding it imperative to link up and try to prevent the ultimate dumbing down of Islam. Islam is not about dress, the kind of beard you grow, and ritual expressions. It is not about praying to be seen by others.  Muhammad had no clergy – he did not want them. Corporate Islam, with its five pillars, has migrated rather far from its source as a means of transformation, of evolution – in other words – spiritual search.

Whenever clerics and their flocks use the corporate religion to discriminate against others, deny others their rights, to wage war and gather booty, to kill for God or simply to reinforce and embellish one’s own puny ego, then you know the whole enterprise has gone off the rails. What we see in the Middle East today, in North Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus and in Central Asia, is a big train wreck.

 

 

 

isH

ARAB REVOLUTIONS 2011-2013                                                                   November 25, 2012

Hypocrisy in Bright Sunlight

Egypt –

President Morsi goes for it, grasping for absolute power, on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2012. The secular people of Cairo and Alexandria rally. On the 26^th, members of the Supreme Judicial Counsel will meet with Morsi. Meanwhile, riots break out and MB buildings are burned in Alexandria. Nobel prize-winning Muhammad al Baradai tried to mediate between secular and sectarian, finally breaking with the Muslim fundamentalists, blaming Morsi. Of course Morsi and his henchmen must, for their own psychological ‘balance,’ regard Islam and themselves as superior to modern ways, modern knowledge, and all other religions.

The Muslim Brothers (Ikhwan) and the Salafiyya would never have marshaled so much support if Saudi Arabia (and the UAE and Qatar) did not plough several billions of $ into Egypt over the past two years. It really is remarkable to trace global presence of Saudi-funded mosques and mullahs. The Wahhabis are intolerant and murderous, destroying Muslim shrines and tombs. They are concerned about outer things, not inner virtues:  the beard, the robe, the literal meaning of the Qur’an and ahadith, praying in each other’s presence, and of course, the lucrative pilgrimage to Mecca.

In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis were built up by Saudi theologians, legal experts and holy warriors, so they won the presidency and parliament. With another $ billion pouring in, Morsi took the chance that he could simply grab absolute power, dominating parliament and the constitutional committee. All this is terrifying to Israel and other Arab states. Westerners, Russians, Chinese, Indians are aghast, appalled.

I am convinced these problems with violent political ‘Islamists’ will only be solved when religious falsehood is exposed for what it is. A ‘way to God’ goes off the rails when it magnifies the human ego, or reinforces the group-self. All true prophets taught a kind of dying to self which cannot happen if ego dominates. Expressed more scientifically, the personality grips the essence and covers it so thoroughly that most humans do not get to experience essence after early childhood.

Since there is no constitution, actions against Morsi are without legal basis. Most have lost trust in the Brothers. They say one thing, then do the opposite.

Syria –

The Muslim Brothers as well as Shi’a warriors from Hizbullah in Lebanon have been building up their forces, again using Saudi and Emirate and Qatari money.  As in Libya, the more effective military units seem to be the Islamists. As I write, Syrian free rebels are claiming to have captured an airfield on the edge of Damascus. The Syrian regime is now fighting ‘everywhere,’ and is losing the ability to deploy fighter bombers and attack helicopters, because the airfields have been overrun.

Syrian jails are jammed packed with young protesters. Freedom fighters are usually shot on the spot. Over the past 20 months, some 40,000 Syrians have gone missing. The regime is likely holding some 15,000. All this drives the uprising. Many ordinary hum drum Syrians have become heroic warriors simply because the regime is so invidiously venal.

The West (and East Asia) is not arming the resistance. No guns and ammo. Instead, the fighting free Syrian forces receive decent radios, med supplies, and perhaps real-time intel. The Sunni Gulf states are providing the weapons and ammo.

Yemen –

The government won back control over towns in the south, but Al Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been roaming around ambushing soldiers and assassinating officials, officers and suspected spies. Back last August, the Americans killed Anwari out in Yemen’s east, the Hadramaut using Saudi intel operatives and a drone.

The US has lost favor as the Yemenis forget that any state which provides a base for terrorists hitting targets outside the country, loses absolute sovereignty. The Pakistanis do not know that either.

Many Yemenis blame the USA more than Al Qaida. The government of course continues to accept American money and, yes, orders. AQAP is trying to kill many innocent Americans and Jews and Shi’a.

All the other regional states are undergoing slow, painful change. Iraq has split up between Shia, Sunni and Kurdistan. President Nur al Maliki failed in his most important task – to keep Iraq together as a multi-ethnic democratic nation. Iran of course is meddling in many ways, not least through the entity known as Muqtada as-Sadr. Iranian operatives can easily pass through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.

Israel/Palestine –

Over November 2012 there was a rapid build-up of tensions. Radical Palestinian jihadists fired off rockets at Israel. Of course they were all inaccurate.  Iranian weapons found their way to Gaza, when Egypt opened up a few border crossings (tunnels). Some 12,000 missiles were fired at Israel, killing 6. No country would let such attacks continue, so Israel responded, killing some 160 and destroying more rockets and ammo caches. HAMAS leaders were targeted and some killed.

Israel had little problem finding them, watching them, from hour to hour, and attacking them from the air. Several thousand people in Gaza are taking money from the Israelis, many not even aware of it. But the Arab people are generally not into perpetual jihad. Muhammad never countenanced such a thing.

Israel is eating its twin – Arab Palestine. The Jews, led by American genocidal ‘conquerors,’  are slowly annexing the West Bank. They did pull out of Gaza, putting its 1.7 million under embargo and many restrictions, while reinforcing their hold over the West Bank.

Bibi the Whiner does not worry that Americans might object to his party’s abject slow-motion genocide, its annexation of Arab Palestine. He has the Americans under his control. Incredibly, the once-great Republican party sponsors ‘christian’ Zionists who egg on the Israelis and  support the deracination of the Arabs in their own lands, some of whom are, of curse, Christians. It’s perverse.

Given such perversity, such hypocrisy, it is not surprising that US government influence in the Middle East and Central Asia is now measured in negatives.  Thanks to the jihadi terrorists of 9/11, most American people do not like Muslims. I wonder what God thinks about the children of Abraham making war on each other.

            by JPM