Mursi - Mistakes and the Road to Istability

The Egyptian constitution passed its first hurdle of two with 56%.  This is not good.  The constitution was written by a Muslim Brotherhood drafting committee devoid of women and from which most liberals, moderates and secularists resigned.  Salafists, a dangerously extreme group of Islamists, have attacked opposition offices.  Dr. Mursi’s rush to judgment to hold a referendum with virtually no time for intelligent study of the document by Egyptian voters and the manner of its alarmingly sudden creation by the drafting committee with no legal scholars should worry him. 

This is a critical document.  The constitution will form the foundation of every other future piece of legislation. A very large section of Egyptian society is against it and against the anti-liberal sentiments of the Muslim Brotherhood and certainly those of the extremist Salafists to whom they are allied.  Rather than provide the stability that Egypt desperately needs, the process that Mursi – and it seems the Muslim Brotherhood to whom he is clearly kneeling and which has never kept its word on any matter – is pursuing could very well have the unintended consequence of mimicking Nouri al-Maliki’s problems in Iraq, together with the attendant violence.

Where religious extremists seek to impose their will on all others there is an ultimate backlash.