The question of Gaza is not just about border security, but also the relation of state and society to religion, or between the secular and theocratic state and the proponents of each, writes Abdel-Moneim Said The people who are attacking Egypt's defensive installations along its borders with Gaza have yet to answer the central questions. Haven't weapons and explosives been smuggled into Egypt through these tunnels? Are not these tunnels connected with smuggling rings that have been created on this side of the border of Egyptians who have no respect for the laws of their own country? Have not Egyptians crossed through these tunnels into Gaza where they received training by "Islamic" organisations, after which they returned to Egypt and committed terrorist attacks in Sinai? Several cities of Sinai have been victim to terrorist attacks, have they not? Did not Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah admit to having created a paramilitary network in Egypt for the purpose of smuggling arms through Egypt and into Gaza? Did not inhabitants from Gaza break down the border wall and storm Egyptian territory? Did this or did this not wreak political and economic damage to Egypt at the domestic and international levels? Does the smuggling of arms into Gaza jeopardise the Egyptian- Israeli Peace Treaty, which could propel Egypt back to the cycle of armed conflict without the consent of the Egyptian government or people? Can a country continue to enjoy the respect of the world after it loses control over its own borders? Are the rings that smuggle weapons into Gaza linked to international terrorist rings that extend through the Red Sea to Somalia, Yemen and perhaps beyond? Is this or is this not a threat to Egypt's national security under normal conventions? Does the existence of another threat to Egypt's national security, namely the Israeli threat in this case, nullify this national security threat? Such questions have little urgency among that class of "neo-Egyptians" who have taken it upon themselves to deviate from the deeply-rooted Egyptian wisdom that holds that Egypt's wholehearted support for the downtrodden and the oppressed in the Arab, Muslim and African worlds stops at that point where those it is trying to defend pose a direct and flagrant threat to Egypt. At that point, there is no such thing as one threat cancelling out the other. Not even Israel with its possession of hundreds of nuclear warheads, its continued occupation of Arab territory and its many ways of sewing instability in the region can make Egypt ignore the security of its borders with Gaza and the security of its water resources when it comes to its relations with the countries of the Nile Valley basin. No state in the world would accept this kind of trade-off between one kind of security threat and another. But perhaps the root of the problem is that the people who point to Israel as the justification for putting up with other real, direct and immediate threats to Egypt's security do not believe in the concept of the state to begin with, let alone the Egyptian state. So they have no qualms about surrendering Egypt's will and autonomy, and its control over whether it is to be at war or at peace, to other governments or political groups. I am sounding an alert, here, not to the Egyptian government but to Egyptian public opinion. There is a group of writers and intellectuals who are turning all the vehemence and vulgarity they can summon, and every emotive trick and logical sleight-of-hand they can conjure up, to drive Egypt to the same fate that now plagues other countries in the region. Fortunately for us, though certainly not for some sister Arab and Islamic countries, we have the benefit of being able to view this group's extensive record of behaviour that ranges from the moderate to the extreme, and that highlights the endless chain of senseless disasters wrought by theocracies or sectarian-based governments. This plague has struck Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is infesting Yemen at an alarming rate and it is injecting its poison into Algeria, Egypt and Libya. These countries and others are -- or threaten to become -- prey to a syndrome of sectarianism and/or ethnocentricity, rejection of the concept of citizenship and blatant or flagrant racism and discrimination that gnaw at the state and results in disintegration and fragmentation. The country is then driven towards a foreign conflict of one sort or another, which ultimately leads to a collapse of government and a security breakdown, and transforms a country striving for development and progress to a failed state dominated by resistance factions, self- proclaimed or otherwise. The real issue is, therefore, far broader and deeper than the question of Gaza. Once again the tunnels and, as usual, the Palestinian cause as a whole are being used as a pretext for exerting pressure on the Egyptian government and for poisoning the Egyptian climate. This is why I reiterate the alert to public opinion against a looming threat to the very existence of the Egyptian state when the ideological extensions, or sources, of Hamas become an instrument for promoting the means to undermine the civic state. The incident in Nagaa Hammadi is, essentially, another of these repeated attacks against the concept and practice of equal citizenship among the Egyptian people. This time there was a strong element of the criminal hand; however, similar crises in the past were the product of the culture of a band of extremists driven to wreak terror against Egyptians whose religion differed from theirs. There are other such groups of varying degrees of toxicity in society. They are fed by a select elite of intellectuals and writers who may not necessarily sport the Muslim Brotherhood organisational emblem but who nevertheless advocate its ideas with amazing zeal, blind both to the toll their ideas have taken on Muslims around the world and to the saner and healthier conditions for millions of other Muslims in such secular states as Indonesia, India, Turkey and Malaysia. Frankly, much of what is happening in Egypt these days is very closely intertwined. The past few weeks, in particular, have brought a number of events that cannot be viewed independently of each other, however different they may appear in nature and circumstance. Several issues have dominated public attention recently. First there is the Gaza border problem, as cast into relief by the demolition of the barriers at Rafah and influx of some 700,000 Palestinians, the Israeli war on Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009, and most recently the fortifications that Egypt is currently building along its border with Gaza for defensive purposes. The second is the drive-by shooting at Nagaa Hammadi on 7 January that ended with seven Christians and Muslims dead and 10 wounded. The third is the presidential elections scheduled for 2011, public debate over which has grown more heated with the emergence of the prospective candidacy of such individuals as Mohamed El-Baradei and Amr Moussa, and campaigns for popular petitions calling for the amendment of the constitutional provisions pertaining to the conditions governing presidential nominations. Fourth is the ongoing campaign to amend Article II of the Egyptian constitution, which states that Islamic law is the chief source of legislation, so as to incorporate all the revealed religions into the constitution without specifying a religious canon. These four issues are diverse facets of a single question. They all revolve around the relationship between religion and the state, or the theocratic state versus the secular state, or religious authority in the secular state. However we phrase it, or whichever aspect we look at, the problem is certain to dominate political and cultural debate in Egypt for a long time to come, since it touches the very heart of the coherence of the state and the relation between the government and the people. Nor can we doubt that the relation between religion and the state is a chronic problem, even though Egypt was one of the first Arab countries to experience the rise of the modern nation state. Starting with Mohamed Ali's attempts to lay the foundations for this institution, the evolution progressed steadily throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries until it took a quantum leap with the 1919 Revolution. The spirit of this revolution was encapsulated in the motto, "Religion belongs to God, the nation to all the people," and it was this spirit that fused the political and cultural elite within the framework of a modern state founded upon a series of constitutions, the first of which was the 1923 constitution. From that point onward, the state confronted numerous challenges inspired by the call to revive the Islamic caliphate. In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was created and over the years that followed it clashed with successive governments and systems of government over the "identity" of the state and its relationship with the contemporary world. On 8 December 1948, Prime Minister Mahmoud Fahmi El-Noqrashi outlawed the organisation and accused it of "incitement and working against national security". El-Noqrashi was assassinated on 28 December 1948. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan El-Banna was assassinated a year later, on 12 December 1949. Following the 1952 Revolution a brief period of calm prevailed between the government and the Muslim Brotherhood. However, tensions quickly resurfaced against the backdrop of the Brotherhood's demand that the Free Officers return to their barracks and allow parliamentary life to resume. The confrontation escalated following the assassination attempt against president Abdel-Nasser in Manshiya Square in Alexandria in 1954. Large numbers of Muslim Brotherhood members were rounded up and imprisoned, and many were executed in 1966. The signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty in 1977 ushered in a new era of tensions between the regime the Brotherhood. Again many Brotherhood members were imprisoned in the course of the clampdown around September 1980. Since then, the government and the Muslim Brotherhood have been engaged in a continual tug-of-war that grew more intense the more adamantly the Brotherhood called for a theocratic state. That call became explicit in the Islamist movement's political party programme that envisioned the creation of an Islamic government to replace the modern Egyptian state. At this moment it is clear that we have reached a crossroads. The time has come to resolve the question and disengage the two sides. The longer we procrastinate separating religion from the state, the more we court the spectre of violence with even more powerful repercussions on the Egyptian state and society. After all, it is impossible to deny, firstly, that the growing frequency of sectarian related violence is directly connected to this problem and, secondly, that our failure to tackle it makes us ask all the wrong questions. For example, once we resolve the question of the separation between religion and the state and secure the concept of the modern civic state in the public mind, Egyptians of all persuasions would easily perceive that what Hamas has been doing presents a threat to the Egyptian state and that the Nagaa Hammadi incident was a case of a brutal attack by some Egyptian citizens against other Egyptian citizens. Conversely, while the question of the relation between religion and the state remains unresolved, various political forces and trends will continue to claim that Hamas does not pose a threat to Egypt and to portray the crime in Nagaa Hammadi as a feud between Muslims and Christians. Perhaps we could best describe our current situation as a nowhere land between two poles. We have not yet attained the modern civic state in its fullest sense as a framework for equality under law and equal justice for all, but nor have we crossed the threshold into a theocracy and the reign of religious authorities over all aspects of life. While many rulings of the judiciary and the Constitutional Court and various articles of legislation show features of the secular state, various developments have worked to consolidate the idea of a theocracy. Although we now have some 26 political parties in Egypt, certain unofficial religious organisations with a theocratic political agenda remain active. As private universities, sporting clubs and domestic tourism spreads, so too have manifestations of religious conservatism, or what some call "alternative piety", such as the veil and the niqab, religious fatwas, segregation between the sexes, harassing those who resist fasting during Ramadan, and women-only public vehicles. Satellite networks now feature many religious stations, both Muslim and Christian, alongside the film, news and entertainment stations, and in that virtual world of Facebook and You Tube there is now a plethora of purely religious websites. One of the problems is that for all our talk about equal citizenship, a segment of our citizens -- the Copts -- feel that they are being discriminated against in the construction of houses of worship, employment in public office, and parliamentary representation. This sense has thrown into relief the question of "Coptic emigration", a phenomenon that relates to various economic and other causes at different times in history, such as the nationalisation policies of the Nasserist period and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and radical Islamist groups at a subsequent period. However, all this has its roots in a different and broader dilemma. While the assorted fundamentalist groups have a clear and resolute policy on the nature of the state, the alternative policy -- the construction of the modern Egyptian civic state -- has been slow, wavering and lacking in imagination and initiative. This has led some of the most ardent supporters of the civic state to shift to the opposing camp. More surprisingly, recent events and trends in Egypt and elsewhere in the region have not stimulated a new and different spirit among political parties and secularist groups in Egypt, including the NDP. Some people might chalk the whole problem up to a failure in marketing strategy. This could be true to some extent. However, at a deeper level there has definitely been a general failure to take the initiative in handling a situation that is both fraught with risk and, at the same time, brimming with opportunity.
