While unrest in Egypt continues, the Egyptian government appears to be fully absent in the streets, and many media address the divisions in Egyptian society, we are working on a documentary publication for Missio on the Egyptian Constitution.  

The Constitution should have become a major binding factor for a deeply divided Egyptian society. Yet, the way it was formed brought instead more division, despite good intentions of many actors.  AWR researchers Jayson Casper, Diana Serodio, and I have met with George Masīhah (Messiha), a prominent member of the Wafd Party, to gain his perspective on how Islamist the Assembly was. Masīhah leaves no doubt. He characterizes the Assembly as overwhelmingly Islamist and described each of the members. This provides us with a unique documentation that, to our knowledge, is not found anywhere else in English language publications.  Masīhah’s analysis was reported by Jayson Casper and can be found here.

 

Masīhah had joined the Constituent Assembly as a replacement for a candidate who had left because he was impressed with the presentations of Dr. ‘Amr Darrāj of the Muslim Brotherhood.  During an Egyptian multi-party visit organized by the Arab-West Foundation in the Netherlands in October 2012, Dr. Darrāj spoke proudly of the good work being done in the Constituent Assembly.  We have placed the recordings of one major presentation of Dr. Darrāj (Darrag) on our website. Dr. Darrāj was passionate, convincing to his audience of Dutch politicians and scholars of law and thus also George Masīhah.

 

Regretfully, the unity that so much characterized the Egyptian delegates of the multi-party delegation and that gave hope for a new Egypt was not found in later discussions in Egypt. These were polarizing and resulted in divisions, more people leaving the Constituent Assembly, including George and ultimately resulting in a Constitution that was widely rejected by non-Islamists. 

 

I find this sad. In addition to number of controversial articles, the current Constitution also contains many good elements.  It was rushed to completion in November because of founded fear that the Constitutional Court could declare the Constituent Assembly invalid, which would have forced parties to start from the very beginning again. But speed has given way to controversy over the disputed articles that were not resolved and that in turn has led to continuous war of words between different parties and frequent unrest in the streets.