Last month, Egyptians approved a referendum on constitutional amendments that will pave the way for free elections. The vote was a milestone in Egypt’s emerging democracy after a revolution that swept away decades of authoritarian rule. But it also highlighted an issue that Egyptians will grapple with as they consolidate their democracy: the role of religion in political life.

The vote was preceded by the widespread use of religious slogans by supporters and opponents of the amendments, a debate over the place of religion in Egypt’s future Constitution and a resurgence in political activity by Islamist groups. Egypt is a deeply religious society, and it is inevitable that Islam will have a place in our democratic political order. This, however, should not be a cause for alarm for Egyptians, or for the West.

Egypt’s religious tradition is anchored in a moderate, tolerant view of Islam. We believe that Islamic law guarantees freedom of conscience and expression (within the bounds of common decency) and equal rights for women. And as head of Egypt’s agency of Islamic jurisprudence, I can assure you that the religious establishment is committed to the belief that government must be based on popular sovereignty.

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A disturbing feature of the crisis in Egypt has been the paucity of any discussion of the implications of the possible rise of fanatical Islamists for Christians, particularly the sizeable Coptic Christian population, estimated at between 10-15 percent of the Egyptian population. The few vague references to their fate were generally voiced as an afterthought to reflections on the repression of women.

This puzzling gap is characteristic of Western analysts who respond only to political and economic explanations. But these have little to do with the deeper social historical complexities of the Middle East and everything to do with religion and the culture. Western analysts seldom understand the importance of religion. Unless conflict has an overt political face it is usually a mystery to them. Yet Christians were out on the street with their fellow Egyptians when Mubarak was ousted, desperate to ward off an Islamic take-over.

In fact the persecution of Copts has intensified over the past 20 years even though few in the West have paid attention to it.

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Islam is bound to play a larger role in government in the Arab world than elsewhere. Most Muslims do not believe in the separation of religion and state, as America and France do, and have not lost their enthusiasm for religion, as many “Christian Democrats” in Europe have. Muslim democracies such as Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia all have big Islamic parties.

But Islamic does not mean Islamist. Al-Qaeda in the past few years has lost ground in Arab hearts and minds. The jihadists are a small minority, widely hated by their milder co-religionists, not least for giving Islam a bad name across the world. Ideological battles between moderates and extremists within Islam are just as fierce as the animosity pitting Muslim, Christian and Jewish fundamentalists against each other. Younger Arabs, largely responsible for the upheavals, are better connected and attuned to the rest of the modern world than their conservative predecessors were.

Moreover, some Muslim countries are on the road to democracy, or already there.

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Abboud al-Zomor ”” the former intelligence officer who supplied the bullets that killed President Anwar el-Sadat and is Egypt’s most notorious newly released prisoner ”” waxes enthusiastic about ending the violent jihad he once led.

“The ballot boxes will decide who will win at the end of the day,” Mr. Zomor said during an interview in his large family compound in this hamlet on Cairo’s western edge. “There is no longer any need for me to use violence against those who gave us our freedom and allowed us to be part of political life.”

In its drive to create a perfect Islamic state, his Islamic Group and other groups like it were once synonymous with some of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Egypt. But they are now leaping aboard the democracy bandwagon, alarming those who believe that religious radicals are seeking to put in place strict Islamic law through ballots.

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Democracy is part of America’s very identity, and thus we benefit in a world of more democracies. But this is no reason to delude ourselves about grand historical schemes or to forget our wider interests. Precisely because so much of the Middle East is in upheaval, we must avoid entanglements and stay out of the domestic affairs of the region. We must keep our powder dry for crises ahead that might matter much more than those of today.

Our most important national-security resource is the time that our top policy makers can devote to a problem, so it is crucial to avoid distractions. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fragility of Pakistan, Iran’s rush to nuclear power, a possible Israeli military response””these are all major challenges that have not gone away. This is to say nothing of rising Chinese naval power and Beijing’s ongoing attempt to Finlandize much of East Asia.

We should not kid ourselves. In foreign policy, all moral questions are really questions of power. We intervened twice in the Balkans in the 1990s only because Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic had no nuclear weapons and could not retaliate against us, unlike the Russians, whose destruction of Chechnya prompted no thought of intervention on our part (nor did ethnic cleansing elsewhere in the Caucasus, because it was in Russia’s sphere of influence). At present, helping the embattled Libyan rebels does not affect our interests, so we stand up for human rights there. But helping Bahrain’s embattled Shia, or Yemen’s antiregime protesters, would undermine key allies, so we do nothing as demonstrators are killed in the streets.

Of course, just because we can’t help everywhere does not mean we can’t help somewhere.

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Egyptians’ embrace of a set of proposed constitutional amendments in this weekend’s referendum is the clearest sign yet that leadership of the country’s revolution may be passing from youthful activists to Islamist religious leaders, according to analysts.

Electoral officials said 77% of Egyptians voted to accept a set of proposed amendments to Egypt’s constitution that will, among other changes, limit the presidency to two four-year terms and ease restrictions on independent political participation, according to results announced Sunday.

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On March 13, Bishop Mouneer Anis of Egypt reported that the Rev. Hamdy Doud, the assistant rector of Christ the King Church remained in Tripoli, caring for the church.

Two of the three clergy have been evacuated from Libya as have the Western expatriate members of the congregation, Bishop Anis reported. However, a number of Anglican Africans remained in the city, unable to flee.

“It is my responsibility to keep the Christian presence here,” Fr. Hamdy told Bishop Anis, adding that he and the city’s “Roman Catholic priests are having a good time of fellowship in spite of the crisis in Libya.”

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Egypt’s military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington’s knowledge, U.S. and Libyan rebel officials said.

The shipments””mostly small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition””appear to be the first confirmed case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters. Those fighters have been losing ground for days in the face of a steady westward advance by forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The Egyptian shipments are the strongest indication to date that some Arab countries are heeding Western calls to take a lead in efforts to intervene on behalf of pro-democracy rebels in their fight against Mr. Gadhafi in Libya. Washington and other Western countries have long voiced frustration with Arab states’ unwillingness to help resolve crises in their own region, even as they criticized Western powers for attempting to do so.

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Six missionaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) will return to the ministries they serve in Egypt by the end of March. The six were among 10 missionaries temporarily evacuated from Cairo Feb. 1 on flights arranged by the U.S. government, because of protests against the government of former President Hosni Mubarak.

The ELCA missionaries, along with one missionary from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), flew to Istanbul, Turkey, and eventually arrived in St. Paul, Minn. Most have been staying in ELCA apartments reserved for missionaries on home assignment while in the United States.

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The turmoil in Libya and elsewhere in the region has toppled or undermined North African dictators who negotiated a web of benefits from Europe, including aid and diplomatic standing, in return for stopping immigrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean.

Without the assistance of those leaders, many in Europe worry that they will face new waves of illegal immigration not only from the liberated areas in the north, but from much of sub-Saharan Africa as well.

The immigrants would arrive at a time when much of Europe ”” struggling with high unemployment and lethargic economies ”” is already awash with anti-immigrant sentiment, and many countries say they are simply incapable of absorbing poor migrants.

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Amid all these commentaries, I have yet to hear anyone speculate on how the communications media that fueled the Arab revolutions will reshape and define the societies and states that emerge from these uprisings. For much of the 20th century such thinking was the realm of Roman Catholic layman and media critic Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). Any student of McLuhan’s (mostly proven) theories would know this: sooner or later the structures that emerge will be rooted in the technological extension of senses implicit in these communications technologies.

McLuhan’s landmark 1964 book Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man presented his primary thesis: the dominant communications medium in any society unconsciously shapes our psychic and social lives irrespective of the content presented through that medium. His still-famous dictum was “The medium is the message.” His insights provoke a number of questions about current events in North Africa. How does mobile phone texting extend our natural capacities? How does it fit into the mélange of graphic and typographic communications technologies used in these cultures? What values are embedded implicitly in these technologies and the process of interacting with them? How does this reshape their consciousness and societies?

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Future historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Arab/Muslim world. We know the big causes ”” tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment and social media. But since being in Egypt, I’ve been putting together my own back-of-the-envelope guess list of what I’d call the “not-so-obvious forces” that fed this mass revolt. Here it is….

THE BEIJING OLYMPICS China and Egypt were both great civilizations subjected to imperialism and were both dirt poor back in the 1950s, with China even poorer than Egypt, Edward Goldberg, who teaches business strategy, wrote in The Globalist. But, today, China has built the world’s second-largest economy, and Egypt is still living on foreign aid. What do you think young Egyptians thought when they watched the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics? China’s Olympics were another wake-up call ”” “in a way that America or the West could never be” ”” telling young Egyptians that something was very wrong with their country, argued Goldberg….

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Steven A. Cook:… Egyptians and foreign observers have taken to calling recent events in Egypt a “revolution,” but technically speaking it isn’t — at least not yet. Mubarak is gone, but his military remains in charge of the country, the proposed constitutional changes are limited, and much of the security apparatus and even the once-ruling National Democratic Party remain strong (at least outside of Cairo and Alexandria).

Now, the constitutional committee has sought to go beyond the five constitutional amendments and the deletion of one article to which the military is (and Mubarak was) committed. The committee has now put eight amendments on the table, including an explicit reference to writing a new constitution.

It’s important to remember that transitions to democracy are fraught and that revolutions rarely end the way that the people on the barricades hoped they would.

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The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

While it is far too soon to write the final chapter on the uprisings’ impact, Iran has already benefited from the ouster or undermining of Arab leaders who were its strong adversaries and has begun to project its growing influence, the analysts said. This week Iran sent two warships through the Suez Canal for the first time since its revolution in 1979, and Egypt’s new military leaders allowed them to pass.

Saudi Arabia, an American ally and a Sunni nation that jousts with Shiite Iran for regional influence, has been shaken. King Abdullah on Wednesday signaled his concern by announcing a $10 billion increase in welfare spending to help young people marry, buy homes and open businesses, a gesture seen as trying to head off the kind of unrest that fueled protests around the region.

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The monumental changes taking place in Egypt should be a clarion call for Western Christians to “run toward Egypt” and take advantage of an opportunity decades in the making, said a Christian worker deeply familiar with the country.

“How long have we been asking the church around the world to pray for the [unreached parts of the world]?” Ron Robinson* asked. “I know for 29 years I’ve been asking American churches, churches in the United Kingdom, Korean Christians to pray for Egypt — that doors would open” to share the Gospel.

“Our prayers are being answered right now…. This is God’s hand at work.”

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Watching the price of oil go up these days is a little like watching a river rise. At what point do we need to get the sandbags? When should we sound the warning horns? What is flood stage?

On Wednesday, the main U.S. oil contract hit $100 a barrel before retreating to $98.10. That was the highest price in more than two years.

Of course, prices could always go down. But with increasing global demand and widespread unrest in the Middle East, it’s possible that the price of fuel ”” by the barrel and by the gallon ”” will continue to rise. And when the price of oil rises, the price of just about everything else ”” driving, heating, shopping, eating and more ”” starts to move up too.

Flood level may be closer than we think.

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ELEANOR HALL: Now Abdul, were you part of the revolution in Egypt?

ABDUL: Yes, I was actually. I flew out from London to join them here.

ELEANOR HALL: So you were part of the revolution in Egypt. How does what happened there compare to what you are hearing about in Libya?

ABDUL: Oh, absolutely nothing. There is no comparison whatsoever. I mean even though there was what 300, 400 casualties here, it was peaceful compared to what is happening over there. They are not using water cannons against them, they are not using tear gas. They are using live ammunition. I’ve even been told that there is helicopter gunships who are flying over crowds and opening fire into them.

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I hope that our leaders will be modest enough to see how (and how often) what we have done or left undone in the Middle East has backfired on us. We have spent trillions of dollars and spilled untold blood in a seemingly endless effort to bring democracy, American style, to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Egyptians ”” citizens of a nation with more people than Iraq and Afghanistan combined ”” won the right to write their own future in just 18 days and with little to no U.S. help.

These facts alone should humble us.
Yet I also hope that we do not trade hubris for paralysis. In the face of the ironies of Egyptian history, I must confess to being tempted to leave things elsewhere in the hands of fate or providence ”” to say with my Muslim friends, “Inshallah,” or with my Christian friends, “Thy will be done.”

But as Niebuhr reminds us, “we must exercise our power.” We must do so, however, in the absence of the hubris that characterized our past foreign policies….

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The other night I found myself dreaming, drifting simultaneously through two parallel worlds, 800 years apart.

In the first vision, I was on the ramparts of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187. News came in from Galilee that the Crusader Armies had been decimated by the overwhelming Muslim forces of the great Sultan Saladin at the Battle of Hattin. Jerusalem, already an island in an angry, surging Muslim sea, was about to be totally engulfed.

My second dream was in the same place, but I was witnessing a 21st-century Islamic encirclement of modern-day Israel. This second trance was apparently shared by some Israeli columnists who openly fear Egypt’s chaotic regime could be followed by an extremist Islamic government, reinforcing that nightmare Crusader scenario of encirclement.

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‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” So goes the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What’s extraordinary about this maxim is the succinct way that it captures the political dimension of Islam. Even more extraordinary is the capacity of these five pillars of faith to attract true believers. But the most remarkable thing of all is the way the Brotherhood’s motto seduces Western liberals.

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Episcopal Church missionary Paul-Gordon Chandler is returning to Cairo on Wednesday after a 10-day respite from Egypt’s political uprising.

“Speaking with our friends on the telephone in Cairo, it is clear that they feel empowered, and that the culture of fear that they have lived under within an authoritarian government has disappeared,” Chandler wrote in a letter to friends and supporters. “There is a sense of profound hope in the streets and a common feeling of good will towards each other. Of course the journey to true representative democracy is a long journey.”

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The quick pace of protests and two regime changes in the Middle East over the last month has stretched the U.S. intelligence community as it scrambles to keep up with events and maintain crucial counter-terrorism contacts, top intelligence officials said Wednesday.

Intelligence analysts had extensive reports on the tense economic and social conditions in the region, but were unable to predict when that volatile mix would ignite enough unrest to topple a government, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“We are not clairvoyant,” Clapper said.

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Our beloved country Egypt is going through a critical time which requires all of us to be united, working together in order to achieve “freedom, democracy and social equality” which are at the heart of the Youth Revolution of 25 January 2011. Without achieving these goals, the Revolution will have been mere words. Therefore, with strong hands, hopeful hearts and with patience, we all need to work each in our own field, until Egypt becomes a developed democratic country. Only then will Egypt regain its pioneering place in the Middle East, a position it has held over the centuries.

We are pleased with the decision of the Minister of Interior to reinstate the motto of the police: “Police in the service of the People.” We hope and trust that the police will make their motto a reality, actively providing a real service to citizens, not just monitoring them. On the other hand, we as citizens need to rebuild our trust in the police, start a new page, and work together for the sake of our beloved country Egypt.

We appreciate the role of the High Council of the Egyptian Army in achieving the dreams of our great nation, that Egypt would become a secular and democratic country in which all of its citizens enjoy their rights which will be guaranteed by the new Constitution.

The Most Rev. Dr. Mouneer H. Anis
Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican Diocese of Egypt
with North Africa and the Horn of Africa
President Bishop of the Episcopal / Anglican
Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. But it has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns that with unrest coursing through the Middle East, other autocratic governments ”” many of them already known to interfere with and filter specific Web sites and e-mails ”” may also possess what is essentially a kill switch for the Internet.

Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

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In Europe, the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been interpreted using a model that is more than 30 years old: the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Commentators have been expecting to see Islamist groups – the Muslim Brotherhood and their local equivalents – either at the head of the movement or lying in wait, ready to seize power. But the discretion of the Muslim Brotherhood has surprised and disconcerted them: where have the Islamists gone?

Look at those involved in the uprisings, and it is clear that we are dealing with a post-Islamist generation. For them, the great revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s are ancient history, their parents’ affair. The members of this young generation aren’t interested in ideology: their slogans are pragmatic and concrete – “Erhal!” or “Go now!”. Unlike their predecessors in Algeria in the 1980s, they make no appeal to Islam; rather, they are rejecting corrupt dictatorships and calling for democracy. This is not to say that the demonstrators are secular; but they are operating in a secular political space, and they do not see in Islam an ideology capable of creating a better world.

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Moaz Abdel Karim, an affable 29-year-old who was among a handful of young activists who plotted the recent protests here, is the newest face of the Muslim Brotherhood. His political views on women’s rights, religious freedom and political pluralism mesh with Western democratic values. He is focused on the fight for democracy and human rights in Egypt.

A different face of the Brotherhood is that of Mohamed Badi, 66-year-old veterinarian from the Brotherhood’s conservative wing who has been the group’s Supreme Guide since last January. He recently pledged the Brotherhood would “continue to raise the banner of jihad” against the Jews, which he called the group’s “first and foremost enemies.” He has railed against American imperialism, and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state.

After Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down on Friday amid the region’s most dramatic grassroots uprising since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Brotherhood became poised to assume a growing role in the country’s political life. The question for many is: Which Brotherhood?

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As the day unfolded, strikes and protests were held outside a string of government offices and at workplaces, eventually prompting a televised statement from Egypt’s military rulers.

The best guarantee of a smooth transition to civilian rule would be if all Egyptians went back to work, the military said.

Strikes and disputes would “damage the security of the country”, the army’s ruling high council said.

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Two priests with strong ties to Egypt said they feared young Egyptian Catholics will turn away from the church because it did not back the protests that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

“If we lose the youth in the church, then we are done,” said Father Makarios Isaac, an Egyptian-born priest of the Archdiocese of Toronto and an associate of Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers who is currently based in Kenya.

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{BOB] ABERNETHY: There was a poll that came out this week taken by phone in Cairo and Alexandria asking questions about these things, and a very low percentage, 15 percent, said they approved of the Muslim Brotherhood. Has there been a change since years ago in that as a new generation has come up?

[GENEIVE] ABDO: Well, I think that the statistic that people that have used is 20 percent generally””that if there were free elections today, 20 percent of Egyptians would vote for Brotherhood candidates, but I think that could be sort of an underestimation.

ABERNETHY: But so what would that mean in a government if the Muslim Brotherhood or any strongly Islamist group had influence?

ABDO: Well, there are a lot of parties in Egypt. There are a lot of political parties, as we all know. Some of them are secular, some are nationalist. The Brotherhood is only one of them. However, the Brotherhood is very well organized, and they’ve been around for a long time. They’re a social, also, organization. They run hospitals. They do a lot of sort of social work in Egypt. So they are very, very influential.

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In the end, Barack Obama made a hugely important but unintended contribution to the democracy revolution in Egypt. Because the White House never found the voice to fully endorse the Tahrir Square revolution until it was over, the people now know one very powerful thing: they did this all by themselves. That is so important. One of the most powerful chants I heard in the square on Friday night was: ”The people made the regime step down.”

This sense of self-empowerment and authenticity – we did this for ourselves, by ourselves – is what makes Egypt’s democracy movement such a potential game-changer for the region. And in case other autocrats have not picked up on that, let me share my second favourite chant from Cairo’s streets after Hosni Mubarak resigned. It was directed at the dictator next door in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, and it went like this: ”We’re not leaving Tahrir until Gaddafi leaves office.” Hello, Tripoli! Cairo calling.

This could get interesting – for all the region’s autocrats….

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