INTRODUCTION
We have a modern compulsion to define states, movements, and revolutions as secular or religious. This was evidenced in discussions about contemporary Egypt, most particularly in analyses of the 2011 revolution, whereby many Western accounts portrayed the revolution as “secular” as opposed to “Islamist” and linked this secularity with its democratic and non-violent nature. During the revolution, references to the revolution's secularity were linked to the supposed absence of the Muslim Brotherhood which was described — somewhat prematurely — as having “missed the boat,” a phrase that plays on expectations that because the Muslim Brotherhood is a religious organization it would somehow seize power in a coup — in a way that other parties would not — and set up its own system.Footnote 1
Egypt has often been described as a secular or semi-secular state, whose partial secularization renders it vulnerable to the process of Islamization initiated by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.Footnote 2 Egypt is often portrayed as having been more fully secularized in the inter-war and Nasserist (1956–1970) periods only to have undergone a partial process of Islamization since the 1970's, an example of which is Article 2 of the 1971 constitution and its subsequent amendment in 1980 to read “the principles of Islamic sharī‛a are the major source of legislation.” The Muslim Brotherhood — and Islamist groups more broadly — have often been framed as having brought about the reversal of Egypt's secularization and for wanting to continue the reversal of such secularization toward some ultimate aim whereby an Islamic state would be established and Islamic law would be implemented. The implication of such a stance is that a reversal of secularization and an implementation of Islamization involves some kind of violence or upheaval to the status quo in terms of fundamental shifts in institutions, sources of authority, and in legal processes and categories (such as rights). This is reflected in the fear that has often been expressed over the question of what impact a Muslim Brotherhood leadership would have or has had on the rights and status of non-Muslims and women. In addition, it is often reflected in the fear that the sovereignty of the Egyptian nation state would be threatened by an Islamist union of Islamic states.
The post-revolutionary electoral success of the Muslim Brotherhood — in terms of Muhammad Mursi taking office as president in June, 2012, the success of the Freedom and Justice Party in the 2011–2012 elections, and the Muslim Brotherhood's prominent representation in the Constituent Assembly (responsible for drafting the new constitution), only added to this fear. The political crisis of November-December 2012 between President Mursi and the Supreme Constitutional Court in which Mursi gave the Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly immunity from the courts so that the assembly's draft of the constitution could be put to a referendum and passed (only to be suspended in July 2013) was frequently framed as resulting from the Islamist nature of the government rather than as resulting from the challenge of governing in a post-revolutionary order. Thus, the assumption that the Muslim Brotherhood had an entirely other “Islamic” agenda to impose which would involve reversing the semi-secular nature of the state still endured. References to a distinction between the true intentions of Islamist groups and the political reality also reinforced such assumptions. Mention of the Muslim Brotherhood's increased “pragmatism” also reflects the premise that it either gave up on its Islamic ideals in favor of a more secular reality or was hiding such an agenda until the time is right.
This article does not argue that the Muslim Brotherhood did not make some important changes that had significant legal consequences, although it questions the assumption that such an outcome is necessarily greater with regard to Islamist parties. However, it does argue that the language of secular versus religious that is often used to describe the Muslim Brotherhood and its policies is of limited use. Framing the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups through the lens of the categories of “secular” versus “religious” or “secular” versus “Islamist” does not bring us any closer to understanding what the religious, the political, the secular, and the Islamic, are for the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, such binaries assume the stability and normativity of these categories, which, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Reference Hurd2007, 12) argues “is unsustainable given the varieties of secularism that exist in the world today and the evidence of ongoing change and contestation surrounding the secular.”
Rather than seeing the Muslim Brotherhood as necessarily opposed to secularism — although according to some definitions it might be — this article argues that the Muslim Brotherhood did in fact evolve to embrace secularism of a certain sort-a statism in which it is the state that determines the boundaries of religion and politics. I will show this by examining how the Muslim Brotherhood — in the decade or so leading up to the revolution and since — defined the religious sphere. In the vein of the work of Talal Asad, I want to unpack “the comprehensive concept of which he or she translates as ‘religion’ into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character.”Footnote 3 By looking at how the group defined religion and the concepts it utilized in association with such a definition, we can gain important insight into what it is that the Muslim Brotherhood intended vis-à-vis the role of religion in the modern Egyptian state. It helps define what one means by the political when defining the Muslim Brotherhood as political Islamists. Looking at how the Muslim Brotherhood defined the religious sphere must force us to complicate the assumption that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the process of imposing an Islamic state on an incompletely secular Egyptian state and that such an imposition, if continued, would have resulted in violence and conflict that would have included — in the name of reversing the secularizing processes of modernity — fundamental changes to existing institutions and legal categories.
In addressing how the Muslim Brotherhood defined the religious sphere, I argue that it conformed to state mechanisms, categories, and concepts for managing religion. Thus, rather than seeking a reversal of secularization, I will show that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the process of adopting the principle of secular power. Here, I argue that the principle of secular power refers not to the privatization of religion and its exclusion from power or to the differentiation between the religious and the political spheres, as is more commonly understood, but to the state's right — and the exercise of that right — to define and manage religion and determine its boundaries within politics. I will draw on the recent work of Hussein Ali Agrama in thinking about the question of secularism, authority, the nation state, and the rule of law in Egypt. I then show how the Muslim Brotherhood was disciplined — or disciplined itself in its bid for state power — to conform to the power of the state to define and manage religion.
Political conflict, I argue, has not occurred over whether Egypt is religious or secular or religious or civil — even if most rhetoric might reinforce that assumption — but over the particular ways in which the state defines and manages religion and the particular categories and terms that are used in the disciplining of religion. Here, I will also draw on the work of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd in thinking about the renegotiation of the secular. I argue that a more useful way of thinking about the Muslim Brotherhood is as an organization that was renegotiating the Egyptian secular settlement. I therefore argue that it is not a matter of whether the Muslim Brotherhood imposed an Islamic state or not, but how the secular was renegotiated and how the state managed, disciplined, and defined religion and what were the institutional mechanisms through which this was done. In this sense, the project of the Islamic state has a number of similarities with that of the modern nation state, in the sense that it is the state that manages, disciplines, and defines religion. The ways in which religion and politics are actually managed in such states will, of course, vary not only between what might commonly be referred to as “Islamist” and “secular” governments, but within different constituencies of those very groups.
I will show the above by discussing the Muslim Brotherhood's rhetoric and discourse as expressed in party platforms, party statements, books, interviews, and discussions over the 2012 constitution in two inter-related areas. One, the question of what role the Muslim Brotherhood envisaged for the current Supreme Constitutional Court — and how this relates to the religious scholars of al-Azhar — in the formulation of legislation and in the assessment of whether legislation conforms to Article 2 of the constitution, both the 1971 constitution and the 2012 constitution. Second, I will also show how the Muslim Brotherhood defined the public order with a particular focus on the idea of the Islamic “framework,” the rights of non-Muslim minorities, and personal status law.
MANAGING RELIGION AND RENEGOTIATING THE SECULAR
In Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, Hussein Ali Agrama argues that contrary to common assumptions that there has been an Islamization of the law in Egypt since the 1970's, in fact, he argues, the law has come to conform to secular liberal expectations of religion in different ways. He uses the case in which a hisba (which refers to the right of an individual to bring a case against someone if that person sees the other person neglecting what is commanded and practicing what is forbidden) was brought against Nasr Abu Zayd in 1995, which resulted in his declared apostasy and therefore his divorce from his wife. Agrama argues that the use of hisba here was not an irrational aberration or a sign of the Islamization of law but rather indicates that liberalized sharī‛a and hisba are actually compatible and that this compatibility arises out of secular power. One of the most important consequences of the hisba was, Agrama argues, that it “represented a power to decide what was essentially religious and what scope it could have in society. That is, hisba, as presented in the courts, was not so different from the active principle of secularism.” This was further enhanced when the state limited the right of hisba to state officials (Agrama Reference Agrama2012, 102). So, Agrama argues, “one way to think about the active principle [of secularism] is to see the state as promoting an abstract notion of “religion” [in distinction to the civil] defining the spaces it should inhabit, authorizing the sensibilities proper to it, and then working to discipline actual religious traditions so as to conform to this abstract notion, to fit into those spaces, and to express those sensibilities” (Agrama Reference Agrama2010, 503). However, this does not result in any finite resolution since the process of drawing the line between religion and politics is continuous and indeterminable so that, “what best characterizes secularism is not a separation between religion and politics, but an ongoing, deepening, entanglement in the question of religion and politics” (Agrama Reference Agrama2010, 502).
Hurd argues that Islamist groups should not be seen as symbolic of the resurgence of religion, but as “renegotiations of the secular” or as in the case of Turkey and Iran, as “examples of religiopolitical accommodation and contestation” (Hurd Reference Hurd2007, 65). In reference to contemporary Turkey, Hurd argues that the change in the relationship between religion and politics that occurred as a result of Kemalist secularism is best understood as an institutional shift in Islam's position and not its elimination (Hurd Reference Hurd2007, 66). Regarding the Iranian revolution of 1979, Hurd argues that it was “a challenge to and an attempt to reconfigure the fundamental categories through which the religious and the secular are conceived and practiced” (Hurd Reference Hurd2007, 77). Thus, she argues, the religious resurgence should rather be seen as “a dispute over the very terms of the debate that structure the discussion of religion and politics” (Hurd Reference Hurd2007, 135).
Understanding the secular as the way in which the state manages and intervenes in religious affairs, along with seeing the parameters for this intervention as subject to renegotiation is a useful — albeit atypical — way of thinking about the Muslim Brotherhood. Such a definition of the secular departs from more traditional theorizations. For proponents of the secularization thesis in the 1960's, secularism was defined as “the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” (Berger Reference Berger1967, 107). Secularization in the West was not only seen as an empirically measurable historical process but also as a normative ideal: freedom from religion was seen to have led to democracy and tolerance and was presumed to be the conditions for their emergence elsewhere. However, the tension between the descriptive and the normative elements of the secularization thesis became increasingly problematic in light of the recent “resurgence of religion” (Berger Reference Berger1999).
More recent theorizations have highlighted that the word is both multivalent and contested, “notoriously shifty, sometimes used descriptively, sometimes predictively, sometimes prescriptively, sometimes ideologically, sometimes implying hostility to religion, sometimes carrying a neutral or positive connotation” (Philpott Reference Philpott2009, 185). In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that rather than understanding secularism as involving public spaces being emptied of God, or a falling off of belief and practice, there is a third sense of secularism that is more operative in the West, and that relates to the conditions of belief. Taylor argues that the West has moved from a society in which belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one option among others (Taylor Reference Taylor2007).
In Public Religions in the Modern World, José Casanova distinguishes between the concept of secularism as a historical process and the theory of secularism as a teleological process. Only secularism as a historical process is partially valid Casanova argues, and distinguishes between its three different aspects: differentiation, religious decline, and the privatization of religion. Casanova argues that one needs to separate the thesis of privatization from the thesis of differentiation and that only the latter is still defensible from both a historical and a normative perspective. For Casanova, the deprivatization of religion, whereby religions have begun to reenter the public sphere can be beneficial: however, there is only room for the public involvement of a religion which respects the thesis of differentiation and can reformulate “its relationship to modernity … while upholding publicly the sacred values of modernity, that is, human life and freedom” (Casanova Reference Casanova1994, 233).
While such attempts to define the secular provide important insights into its complexity and into the tensions involved in its definition, all assume that the project of directly defining the secular is possible. However, Talal Asad has argued that it is only possible to approach the secular indirectly. Differentiating the concept of the secular from secularism, he argues that the “secular” and the “religious” are not essentially fixed categories and that the “secular is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it … nor a simple break from it” (Asad Reference Asad2003, 25). The secular is, he argues, “a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life” (Asad Reference Asad2003, 25). What is distinctive about secularism, he argues, is “that it presupposes new concepts of “religion,” “ethics,” and “politics,” and new imperatives associated with them” (Asad Reference Asad2003, 1–2). He goes on to say that secularism is a doctrine that “requires the distinction between private reason and public principle” and that therefore “it also demands the placing of the “religious” in the former by “the secular”” (Asad Reference Asad2003, 8).
Understanding secularism as the way in which the state manages religion and defines and redefines it (see also, Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005, 77) derives from this emphasis upon the secular as a historically contingent construct that is connected with certain concepts and sensibilities behind which lies the exercise of power. Understanding secularism as the way in which the state defines what constitutes the religious and the civil, along with seeing the parameters for this intervention as subject to ongoing renegotiation, can then allow us to think less in terms of secularism as a particular model for state and society and more in terms of the variety of religion-state relationships that can be continuously constructed. By arguing that we can understand the Muslim Brotherhood as secular in sort of way is not to say that there are no important distinctions between the kind of state envisaged by the Muslim Brotherhood and the kind envisaged by groups that identify themselves as secular. In fact, one can imagine several different states that are secular yet define and redefine religion and politics differently.
Through looking at Muslim Brotherhood discourse, I will show how it has sought to manage and define the religious sphere that in many ways correspond with how the Egyptian state previously managed and defined religion. So, just as Agrama says that the state promotes abstract notions of religion and disciplines these traditions to conform to these abstract notions, I argue that the Muslim Brotherhood in many ways shows it was disciplined to conform to these abstract notions of religion. Agrama shows how the concept of religion has been abstracted in contrast to the civil and linked to the distinction between the private and the public spheres (Agrama Reference Agrama2010). W. C. Smith was one of the first scholars to undertake a historical genealogy of the emergence of the abstract idea of religion as a system of ideas and practices, with the assumption that it is an observable product that can be quantified and compartmentalized (Smith Reference Smith1978). Asad has written extensively on the subject, most recently about the concept of religion's association with belief (Asad, Reference Asad and Orsi2012b) with the underlying assumption that it is therefore connected with the personal and private sphere and separate from the political. In addition, in adopting those abstract notions of religion, as will be seen, for example, in the way that the Muslim Brotherhood associates “religion” with the sphere of personal status, the Muslim Brotherhood has tried to renegotiate them — as can be seen in the negotiations that took place over the constitution of 2012. Through this renegotiation, the Muslim Brotherhood wished to make changes that corresponded with its mission as an Islamist group, but these changes worked within existing institutions and categories and therefore reinforced the principle of secular power rather than undermined it.
Russell McCutcheon shows how the classification of the religious versus the political, the sacred versus the secular, and faith versus practice enable groups to differentiate themselves within the limits of their own group and in distinction from others. Classifications become a means by which historical groups negotiate sets of interests. To create these boundaries and limits is a political act (McCutcheon Reference McCutcheon2005). Thus, rather than assuming that religion is a semi-autonomous existing collection of beliefs, I show how religion is a concept that is to be continually managed, and how it was managed and adopted reflects the political goals and interests of the Muslim Brotherhood as it gained and tried to consolidate its hold on state power.
THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND THE STATE
The Muslim Brotherhood as an “Islamist” group has often been framed as being in opposition to the secular nation state. Frédéric Volpi has shown how political Islam has been defined as the “attempt to establish [my italics] an Islamic state and to implement an Islamic legal system (shari'a)” (Volpi Reference Volpi2010, 203). The operative words here are “establishing an Islamic state” and “implementing” Islamic law. Such language assumes a violent founding act that would implement a system that would reconfigure the institutions and legal categories of the state. The problem with the application of such language to Islamist groups is that other groups are not subject to it. Secular or socialist parties are assumed to be proposing a political system that is more in line with the status quo.
One of the problems with any definition of Islamism is that it comes from the vantage point that assumes the normative separation of religion and politics. Salvatore argues that “the attribution to Islam of an inherently political dimension states the degree of the divergence of this religion from the assumed normality, and the degree of the divergence of the ‘Islamic’ polity from a normal concept and practice of politics” (Salvatore Reference Salvatore1997, xx). Roxanne Euben has pointed out that “the post-Enlightenment rationalist methods scholars use to study politics actually produce an image of Islamic fundamentalism while concealing such “mechanisms of production” within claims of rationalist objectivity” (Euben Reference Euben1999, xiv).
However, such views on political Islam are not simply generated by Western liberal assumptions about the normative separation of religion and politics. Islamist literature has internalized these assumptions and has therefore reinforced the binaries of religious versus secular while claiming to operate against them. Hasan al-Bannā (1906–1949), the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, called for, “reform of the government until it is truly Islamic.” He argued that, “Islam is a complete system which deals with all areas of life. It is a state, a nation, a government, and a community” (al-Banna Reference al-Bannā1965, 13, 7). Sayyid Qutb claimed that Islam is a “system” with the assumption that it is a sealed off, self-sufficient, and fully organizational system to be imposed in replacement of the existing “secular” one. In addition, his distinctly modern use of the concepts of al-Jāhiliyya (which literally means period of ignorance, but is generally understood to have referred to Qutb's belief that the Egyptian regime and Egyptian society had turned their backs on Islam) and hākimiyya (which refers to Qutb's belief that the right to legislate belongs only to God and delegitimizes any system that is based on rule by the people), also assume a revolutionary act that would overturn the secular order (Qutb, n.d.). While the Muslim Brotherhood has for some time distanced itself from the revolutionary ramifications of his thought, Western scholarship has allowed Sayyid Qutb's thought to dominate interpretations of — and writings on — Islamism. However, the contemporary Muslim Brotherhood has for some considerable time argued that it does not question the legitimacy of the current state and is ideologically distinct from Qutbian Islamism. It accepts that Egypt is an Islamic state, although it has consistently called for making all aspects of Egyptian law conform to Article 2 of the Egyptian Constitution.
While the Muslim Brotherhood captured state power after the revolution, this was not necessarily the aim of the organization as a whole prior to the 2011 revolution. While there might have been a level of duplicity on the part of the Brotherhood, especially given the nature of its relationship with the Mubarak regime, its change of tactic must also be understood within the context of the differing agendas represented in the organization itself. Many members — often the older generation — prior to the 2011 revolution, emphasized that the Muslim Brotherhood's priority was not to gain control of the state but to advance reform by educating the people and that it was better to assume power once citizens were fully committed to the implementation of sharī‛a.
However, during the 1980's and 1990's, the Muslim Brotherhood's younger generation infiltrated the media and the professional syndicates. As a result, it captured the majority of seats in the syndicates and competed successfully within the elections of student associations and university faculty clubs. These members pushed for the development of a party platform, the draft of which was released in August 2007 although after considerable controversy stemming from the platform, the Supreme Guide of the time, Muhammad Mahdī ‛Ākif (2004–2010), halted any revisions to it. Before the 2011 revolution, it appeared that the Muslim Brotherhood had suspended any movement to separate the religious movement from the political party (Hamzawy Reference Hamzawy2007). However, the revolution gave strength to members of the organization who were interested in capturing state power and resulted in the formation of the Freedom and Justice Party shortly after the 2011 revolution.
ARTICLE 2 AND THE SUPREME CONSTITUTIONAL COURT
One of the principles of secular power, Agrama argues, is that the state is authorized to distinguish between the “civil” and “religious” dimensions of an act, and “on that basis decide whether the act is enforceable, punishable, or otherwise deserving of protection or exemption under the law.” This ability to distinguish between the civil and the religious leads to the “centrality of a public/private distinction” without which “secular power could not be brought to bear” (Agrama Reference Agrama2012, 72).
Here it is instructive to look at how the Muslim Brotherhood responded to the question of who has the right to define what counts as religious in addition to how it understood the distinction between the civil and the religious spheres. The distinction between a civil and a religious state has become a cornerstone of the organization's discourse since the 1990's. In response to criticism that it wanted to “establish” an “Islamic state,” the Muslim Brotherhood deliberately downplayed the concept of the Islamic state and emphasized that it intended a civil as opposed to a religious state. The distinction between the civil and the religious state formed the bedrock of its responding discourse of legitimacy and yet what it means by those very concepts has been interrogated so little. Some have argued that the concept itself is an oxymoron (Tadros Reference Tadros2012, 66) yet such a claim assumes the stability of the category civil in addition to assuming that secular governance is not constrained by normative frameworks.Footnote 4
Muslim Brotherhood statements about who has the right to decide on the compatibility between Article 2 and Egyptian legislation are instructive for looking at how the organization distinguished between the civil and the religious spheres. The Muslim Brotherhood's position on this represented deference to the status quo while advancing its interests as tried to consolidate its hold on state power. In this way, its agenda contained a number of similarities with the agenda of the modern secular state even though it might have been engaged in a renegotiation of that secular settlement, a renegotiation that might have involved a somewhat different handling of the relationship between religion and politics.
Article 2 of the constitution of 1971, which was amended in 1980 to read “the principles of Islamic sharī‛a are the major source of legislation,” did not result in a shift of legal authority away from the state despite the article's reference to the sharī‛a. The locus of legal authority since the establishment of the modern Egyptian state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been — and has continued to be since the promulgation of the 1971 constitution — the state itself as opposed to the religious scholars, the ‛ulamā (Hallaq Reference Hallaq2003–2004, 254–255). Johansen argues that even with Article 2, the very process of codification detached sharī‛a from pre-modern norms since “the policy of codification led to the creation of a system of law in which legal norms were either obliging or empowering. The fiqh notion that a legal system should contain nonenforceable ethical norms was abandoned in the process of codification” (Johansen Reference Johansen2003, 696).
Since its establishment in 1979, the Supreme Constitutional Court — whose judges are civil law and constitutional judges with little formal training in Islamic law — has been entrusted with the review of laws and regulations promulgated by the People's Assembly and the President, and with overseeing the compatibility between legislation and Article 2 (although the Supreme Constitutional Court stated that this would not be retroactive (Moustafa Reference Moustafa2007, 109–100)). Thus, it has been the Supreme Constitutional Court, and not the ‘ulamā’ of al-Azhar, which has assessed whether legislation conforms to the principles of the sharī‛a. By controlling the interpretation of Islamic law, the Supreme Constitutional Court has thus held the right to define what counts as religious and has therefore retained the secular legal order (Bälz Reference Bälz, Dupret, Dupret and al-Zwaini1999, 229–243).
The question of who gets to decide on the compatibility of Article 2 and Egyptian legislation became a particular source of contention when the Muslim Brotherhood issued a draft party platform in 2007. This platform stated that the principal frame of reference for sharī‛a would be the consensus of a body of ‘ulamā’. Two key passages read as follows: “the legislative authority must seek the opinion of an organization of great ‘ulamā,’ (hay'at min kibār ‘ulamā’ al-dīn)” and “the basic referential authority (al-marji‛iyya al-asāsiyya) for the sharī‛a Islāmiyya is the consensus of the Muslim jurists, which is limited to the sharī‛a's two principle sources, the noble Qur'an and the strong Prophetic Hadith” (Barnāmij al-Hizb, 10–11).Footnote 5 It went on to say that the opinion of Islamic jurists concerning aspects of the Qur'an and the Sunna upon which there is juristic consensus must be sought, although it was ambiguous with regard to the question of whether the legislative assembly is actually compelled to implement such a consensus after opinions have been sought. Beyond areas of consensus relating to the Qur'an and the Hadith — although the authors of the platform mistakenly assume such consensus exists — the interpretations of the ‘ulamā’ constitute human endeavors and can be rejected (10–11). It is then up to the legislative body to decide upon according to the interests of the community.
The platform caused a public outcry and many Muslim Brotherhood reformists voiced their discomfort with the amount of power that the platform gave to the ‘ulamā.’ Footnote 6 The outcry — which involved accusations that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to establish an Iranian-style clerical state — resulted in an important shift. The Muslim Brotherhood reformers — in a way that was not denied by the party's conservatives — increasingly emphasized that the role of the ‘ulamā’ should be consultative and not legislative. After the 2011 revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood re-iterated this position and in November 2011, the Secretary General of the newly established political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Freedom and Justice Party, Muhammad Saad Katatni, stated that:
our party is not a religious party, it is a civil party … we reject a religious country to be governed by imams who issue laws, because the parliament is the only authority entitled to issue laws within the framework of the Islamic sharī‛a. The imams should have nothing to do with resolving differences in the interpretation of the law … We see the principles of the Islamic sharī‛a law as the framework that governs us when we enact laws.Footnote 7
The party platform of 2011 also stated that the Islamic state is civil which is not a:
theocratic state that is ruled by the clergy let alone those who rule in the name of divine right. For there are no people who are protected from sin who hold a monopoly over the interpretation of the Qur'an or who can take exclusive possession of legislation for the umma and are characterized by holiness. Rather, the rulers in the Islamic state are citizens who have been elected by the will of the people. The umma is the source of authority.Footnote 8
While the Muslim Brotherhood shifted to emphasizing that the ‘ulamā’ should have a consultative and not a legislative role, a further shift occurred. An agreement emerged that the Supreme Constitutional Court and not the hay'at kibār al-‘ulamā’ should judge whether legislation contradicts Article 2, a suggestion that had been made by the influential scholar Yūsuf al-Qaradāwī (Hamzawy Reference Hamzawy2007; al-Qaradāwī Reference al-Qaraḍāwī1997, 31).Footnote 9 The 2011 platform states that the state envisaged by the Freedom and Justice Party is one in which “the Supreme Constitutional Court should supervise the constitutionality of … legislation.”Footnote 10
After the revolution, however, the Muslim Brotherhood showed flexibility with regard to the question of the role of the ‘ulamā’ in assessing the compatibility of legislation with Article 2. During discussions that took place over the drafting of the 2012 constitution — and Article 2 in particular — Ahmad al-Tayyib, the shaykh of al-Azhar, proposed that a provision be added that states that al-Azhar would be the referential authority (marja‛iyyat al-Azhar) for interpreting the sharī‛a and therefore for overseeing the compatibility of legislation with Article 2.Footnote 11 The Muslim Brotherhood initially agreed with this, but once it encountered opposition from secular parties it stated it would not insist on it and would agree to the idea that the reference of authority could remain with the Supreme Constitutional Court.
During the months leading up to the completion of the draft constitution at the end of 2012, conflicting information was issued relating to Article 2, ranging from claims that Article 2 would remain the same, to claims that Article 2 would in fact contain a clause that referred to the “marja‛iyyat al-Azhar.”Footnote 12 Other possibilities that lie in between were suggested, ranging from “any arguments over the sharī‛a are to be settled by the opinions of the Azhar senior scholars” to a clause referring to the advice of al-Azhar if the legislative assembly chooses to seek it. The constitution ended up having Article 2 as the same, i.e., dropping reference to “marja'iyyat al-Azhar,” although Article 4 of the 2012 constitution states that “the opinion of al-Azhar's council of senior scholars is sought in matters pertaining to Islamic sharī‛a.”Footnote 13 In addition, Article 219, which defines the “principles” of Islamic sharī‛a as stated in Article 2 as “full evidences, rules conforming to prevailing jurisprudential principles, and sources valued by the Sunni schools of law and the community”Footnote 14 appeared to strengthen — although in an ambiguous way — the role of the Sunni establishment.
While the constitution of 2012 gave al-Azhar a more important role than the constitution of 1971 — one that could have, critics said, led to complications depending on how al-Azhar chose to exercise this role — it is important to note that it clearly continued with the constitution of 1971 in giving legislative oversight to the Supreme Constitutional Court. Article 175 states that “the Supreme Constitutional Court is an independent judicial body, seated in Cairo, which exclusively undertakes judgments about the constitutionality of laws and statues.”Footnote 15 Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood dominated Constituent Assembly did not give legislative oversight to the religious scholars of al-Azhar — although it did formalize some sort of consultative role for them — as was so often feared. Article 175 thus reflected a consolidation of the principle of secular power since the state and its institutions maintained the right to define the spaces which religion — and what relates to Islamic sharī‛a — should inhabit. Thus, while the Supreme Constitutional Court and the Muslim Brotherhood were in a state of conflict in part over the question of the legality of the Constituent Assembly itself, this should not detract from the fact that with regard to the court's legislative oversight, there is considerable continuity — albeit arguably added ambiguity — with the pre-revolutionary semi-secular order.Footnote 16
In discussing the question of the relationship between Islamic politics and the state, Talal Asad has argued that “the modern state is a structure distinct from rulers and ruled [in the Islamic past], and its constitutional duty is to maintain itself as a state by any means necessary; it does not have any space within its territory that is independent of its absolute authority.”Footnote 17 While the 2012 constitution gave the ‘ulamā’ of al-Azhar more of a role — albeit an ambiguous and secondary one — the state, in assigning that particular role to the ‘ulamā’, still maintained its right to authorize the spaces in which the representatives of religion can operate. There was also an implicit assumption that there is a distinction between matters that relate to Islamic sharī‛a and matters that relate to laws and statutes, with the former, based on Katatani's words above, relating to a “framework.” Even so, formally establishing a particular institution's right to decide on the sharī‛a would have marked a significant shift from the pre-modern sharī‛a and its methods of enforcement. It would have marked a further consolidation of the project of the modern Egyptian state.
In addition, the relatively neutral position that the Muslim Brotherhood took on the various proposed possibilities was instructive. One might put it down to the group's opportunism, but the important issue here is that in all these debates, the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the renegotiation of the secular, i.e., it was working within and reinforcing the categories and institutions that relate to the state's right to define and manage religion. This is most clear in the Muslim Brotherhood's agreement that the Supreme Constitutional Court should remain the referential authority for overseeing the compatibility of legislation with Article 2, which is interesting given the Supreme Constitutional Court's historical role in curtailing executive power, expanding freedom of expression, and strengthening civil and human rights safeguards (Moustafa Reference Moustafa2007, 1).
In connection with this, the Muslim Brotherhood's discourse has also adopted the custom of defining the religious scholars as “men of religion” and thereby by limiting the religious to a distinct sphere. The Muslim Brotherhood frequently referred to the authority of the religious scholars as being limited to “religious” concerns encapsulated in the phrases ‘ulamā’ al-dīn (the ‘ulamā’ of religion) and rijāl al-dīn (the men of religion). Religious scholars are, it was argued, experts in religion just as doctors are expert in medicine (Barnāmij al Hizb, 11).Footnote 18
This implies that there are areas of expertise that it is not appropriate for the ‘ulamā’ to be involved in, thereby limiting the authority of the ‘ulamā’ of al-Azhar to the religious sphere although how that is managed and what sharī‛a actually consists of remains a significant question.Footnote 19 Such an arrangement enhances the role of Azharites as guardians of a particular sphere and enables them to resist against further encroachment of that sphere. Berkey points out that the “the identification of certain areas of intellectual discourse as ‘religious’” has meant that “the dynamics of modernization have tended to affirm their [the ulamā's] roles as custodians of the Muslim tradition” (Berkey Reference Berkey and Zaman2007, 53). However, it also bolsters the role of the Muslim Brotherhood within the legislative system since many — although this does not apply to all — members of the Muslim Brotherhood are not trained in the Islamic sciences and are not necessarily interested in losing political power to a legislating body of ‘ulamā’.Footnote 20
PUBLIC ORDER
Another important aspect of Muslim Brotherhood discourse that also illustrates the organization's conformity to the principle of secular power for disciplining religion is its use of the concept of public order (al-nithām al-‘āmm). The Muslim Brotherhood used this concept to manage and define religion and to advance its own interests in its bid for — and consolidation of — state power. By linking the concept of public order to religious sensibilities and thereby trying to co-opt the Coptic Christian community, the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in a renegotiation of the secular in a way that, while hardening some of the legal boundaries relating to minorities, conformed to the power of the modern nation state to manage those spaces.
The concept of public order is of European origin and was introduced into the Egyptian legal system around the end of the 19th century.Footnote 21 Article 13 of the 1923 constitution restricted the freedom to perform religious rituals “by public order and traditions in the Egyptian state.”Footnote 22 The Court of Cassation, in several rulings in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, had defined public order as “the social, political, economical or moral principles in a state related to the highest (or essential) interest … of society” or as “the essence of the nation” (Berger Reference Berger2003, 725). In 1979, the same court defined public order as being based on secular doctrine. However, it was also argued that public order is “sometimes based on a principle related to religious doctrine in the case when such a doctrine has become intimately linked with the legal and social order, deeply rooted in the conscience of society” (Berger Reference Berger2001, 104). Thus, while seemingly a secular concept, Maurits Berger has shown how the concept of public order has been used to endorse Islamic rules, “prevent non-Muslim rules from being applied because they violated essential rules of Islamic law” and to protect the essential values of non-Muslim law and therefore the autonomy of non-Muslim religious communities (Berger 200, 1129–1130, 118–121).
In discussing the trial of Nasr Abu Zayd and the hisba case, Agrama argues that hisba became “connected to those concepts and practices — public order, public interest, family and civil procedure — that characterize modern court litigation” (Agrama Reference Agrama2012, 146). He shows that the rights of God in classical sharī‛a were redefined in terms of the public order and public interest and that this gave “religious belief a public character that it had not had before under Egyptian civil law” (Agrama Reference Agrama2012, 66). Agrama argues that although Islam has been designated as part of the public order, this is not a contradiction of a supposedly secular concept, but actually “enables the state to restrict the social range of Islam and to exercise the active principle of secular power” (Agrama Reference Agrama2012, 39).
Hurd argues that secularism in the West “has been constituted and reproduced through opposition to particular representations of Islam,” whereby political Islam “is conceived as a threat to a democratic and laicist public order” (Hurd Reference Hurd2007, 4, 10). The Muslim Brotherhood used the concept of public order — with a more categorical commitment to its religious nature than the Egyptian courts have before now expressed — to legitimize itself as an Islamic group that is based on Islam. However, it did so in such a way that the group could distance itself from the accusation that it was preoccupied with a literal application of the ahkām of sharī‛a and in so doing show commitment to current institutional and legal realities. Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood, through the concept of public order and other related concepts such as “framework,” defined, managed, and in some cases restricted the religious sphere. This is illustrated by looking at the way in which public order was used to express a certain kind of religious sensibility that provides thawābit (limits, constants, or values that cannot be transgressed). This concept of a framework based upon religious sensibilities was then used to include certain religious minorities in the public order and exclude others.
Instructive here are the ideas of Rafīq Habīb, who was vice-president of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing from July 2011 to December 2012. Rafiq Habīb is a Protestant Copt and a founding member (in 1996) of the more liberal al-Wasat party, formed by former Muslim Brotherhood members. Habīb then left al-Wasat when he felt that the party had become too liberal in its willingness to give up on certain “thawābit.”Footnote 23 He is director of the Coptic Evangelical Association for Social Services and son of the Revd. Samuel Habīb, the late head of the Evangelical millet council. Rafiq Habīb is perhaps an unlikely associate of the Muslim Brotherhood, but in some ways it is precisely because he is a Christian that his ideas concerning religion and the public order have the capacity to undercut common assumptions concerning the relation between religion and politics in Egypt.
One of Habīb's key concepts is that of the “Arab-Islamic civilization” or “Arab-Islamic system (al-nithām al-‛arabī al-islāmī) which is the answer, Habīb argues, to the “civilization crisis” that the Arab-Islamic world is currently facing (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 5). This civilization is, he argues, the product of the contribution of three different phases, the Pharaonic, the Christian, and the Islamic (Habīb Reference Habīb2001, 5, 168–169, 219). He calls for the revival of Arab traditions (al-taqālid al-‛arabiyya) of the inherited “Arab-Islamic system” which would include greater respect for terms and concepts derived from Arabic political and social thought as opposed to Western concepts such as democracy and human rights (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 94–95).
The priority of duties over rights is an important feature of the Arab-Islamic system. While Habīb does not argue that “the Arab-Islamic culture does not know about human rights” he argues that the emphasis upon human rights in the West is derived from and connected to state power (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 96). Rather, he argues, that in the Arab-Islamic culture, the basis is not the state but the values of the religious and civilizational creed which then inform the law, and it is then the duty of the state to protect that law. It is therefore the creed (‛aqīda) that constitutes the obligatory framework and this creed expresses the faith of the people first before it becomes an expression of a particular legal or political system. The constants or “thawābit” of this framework are true for all groups and social constituencies of the civilization as they are for the state, and all its political, economic, and legal organizations (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 96–97). Thus, it is the creed that people believe in — with its values that cannot be transgressed — that defines the public order “and in turn that public order defines for these people the foundation upon which their behavior rests” (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 98). And it is the public order that requires obedience and not the state: the state's power only comes from its obligation “towards the public order” (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 102, 104).
Habīb then relates the idea of the concept of a framework and public order to religion in general and to the concept of the divinely revealed religions in particular. “Religious belief,” he argues “represents the essence of the Arab-Islamic civilization” and forms the basis for the public order (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 97, 109–100, 120). Yet religious belief means, for Habīb, the concept of the divinely revealed religions “al-aqā’id al-samāwiyya.” Such religions are characterized by the fact “that human beings worship only God and not others” (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 162–163). In believing in the divine religions, “the human being becomes … dedicated to certain principles and values, including social responsibility and civil values and the unity of the umma, which is maintained by those values and not by the law or the state” (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 128, 131).
The concept of the divinely revealed religions forms the basis for Habīb's understanding of religious freedom. Christian and Muslims have lived together in this community, he argues, in the framework of the Arab-Islamic umma. While Muslims and Christians are bound together socially they are also bound by a common respect for religious sensibilities (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 114–115; Habīb Reference Habīb2001, 233–234). In this Arab-Islamic civilization, he argues, the individual is not separate from, but rather an integral part of, the community. The individual “has a social role that stems from religious faith” (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 113). Habīb therefore argues that it is this respect for religious sensibilities that binds Christians and Muslims, and, in so doing, he presents a different model for Coptic Christians to aspire to, based on the concept of the Arab-Islamic civilization, with its respect for the sacred, as opposed to the secular one based on human rights.
In the West, Habīb argues, individuals, while enjoying the freedom to go against religion and morals, cannot revolt against the state (Habīb Reference Habīb2003, 164). However, in the Arab-Islamic civilization, individuals cannot go against religion and therefore against the public order. Habīb agrees with many aspects of what are normally associated with Islamic law. For him, such laws are not specifically Islamic, but form an integral part of the Arab-Islamic system and are an expression of that culture. For example, Habīb's commitment to the concept of the divinely revealed religions means that he argues that Bahā'īs should have the right to do whatever they want in their own homes but that this cannot extend to the right to build Bahā'ī temples, to have their own personal status law, or have their religion recognized on their national identity cards. Similarly, Rafīq Habīb is against apostasy, arguing “we don't think of it in terms of being my right to change my religion […] in our values […] it is a kind of obligation to be faithful to your religion all your life.”Footnote 24
Habīb's linkage of public order and religion and his use of the category of religion to express the concept of a framework or thawābit that provides limits to the democratic-Arab-Islamic system is an interesting expression of the modern attempt to define, manage, and authorize the spaces for religion. In addition, Habīb's thought provides a useful basis for thinking about the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement in negotiations over the 2012 constitution. Suggested amendments or additions relating to Article 2 and non-Muslim minorities and the Muslim Brotherhood's position on this question corresponded with a greater desire to make a more formal and legally enforceable commitment to the concept of the divinely revealed religions and to the notion of religious values or constants (thawābit).
The constitution of 1971, Article 2 of which was amended in 1980 to read “the principles of sharī‛a are the major source of legislation” made no mention of a corresponding right for non-Muslims to follow their own personal status law. The constitution did contain a clause about “freedom of belief and the freedom of practicing religious rites,” and, after the amendments of 2007, it contained a clause relating to the principle of citizenship.Footnote 25 While Article 9 of the 1971 constitution states that, “the family is the basis of the society founded on religion, morality, and patriotism,” it was not the constitution, however, but Egyptian legislation that stated that, “the personal status law of all Egyptians, regardless of their religion, is governed by Islamic law.” At the same time, Muslims were given the freedom, under the abolition of the sharī‛a and milli courts of 1955, to apply non-Muslim personal status laws (Berger Reference Berger2001, 92, 89). For the most part, this only applied to officially recognized religious communities although some recent court decisions reflected some ambiguity on this question (Berger Reference Berger2001, 88).Footnote 26
While the Muslim Brotherhood endeavored to make a formal commitment to the rights of non-Muslims to follow their own personal status law, it also endeavored, supported by al-Azhar, to limit that commitment to the divinely revealed religions.Footnote 27 Hence, Article 3 of the 2012 constitution reads: “the principles of Christian and Jewish laws are the main source of legislation for followers of Christianity and Judaism in matters pertaining to personal status, religious affairs, and the nomination of religious leaders.”Footnote 28 In addition, Article 43 reads: “Freedom of belief is an inviolable right. The State shall guarantee the freedom to practice religious rites and to establish places of worship for the divine religions, as regulated by law.”Footnote 29
The concept of personal status law (qānūn al-ahwāl al-shakhsiyya) goes back to the establishment of the category in the late 19th century. It occurred when, as a result of European colonialism, sharī‛a law was pushed back — with the implementation of Western civil and criminal law — to the family, which, Mahmood argues, as a distinct legal domain “did not exist in its present form in the pre-modern period” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2012, 58). Sharī‛a was limited to the family which thus necessitated this definition of a separate legal category dealing with marriage, divorce, inheritance, guardianship, and custody. Thus, the concept was entirely new and demarcated a specific sphere. Talal Asad argues that as a result, sharī‛a law was not just reduced in scope but radically transformed because it was at this point that there occurred important reconfigurations in law, religion, ethics, and morality (Asad Reference Asad2003, 206).Footnote 30
Among Islamist thinkers and writers, the concept of personal status law and its locus of the family are often used as a way of appealing to liberal sensibilities relating to religious autonomy and freedom of religion (al-Qaradāwī Reference al-Qaradāwī1985, 18). However, it is also done in such a way that emphasizes the link between public order and the divinely revealed religions. Thus, the Egypt envisaged by the Muslim Brotherhood is one of religious communities and not of religiously unaffiliated autonomous individuals. This can also be seen in the Muslim Brotherhood's emphasis upon the role of the Egyptian Coptic Church in Egyptian society. The 2011 Freedom and Justice Party Platform stated:
Hence, we believe there is a need for us to further support the role of the Egyptian Church in order to maintain society's values, morals and ethics, and also to confront the growing waves of corrupting intellectual and moral invasion, aimed at Egyptian, Arab and Muslim societies. We should also support the values of family cohesion, social solidarity and national unity, in all the aspects of social life. This should be done through cooperation with all state institutions and civil society in Egypt and the development of constructive, effective dialogue between the Church on the one hand and between the Al-Azhar, Religious Endowments Authority and other civil Islamic institutions on the other hand, in order to maintain the cohesion of the Egyptian national fabric and the advancement of the community, because these are the responsibility of all Egyptians. We also believe that there is a need to support the church's leadership role for the Christians of the East. Footnote 31
Viewing the Coptic Church as having a role in the maintenance of values and Egyptian family life parallels Habīb's linkage between religion, the divinely revealed religions, public order, and national unity. This can be seen as directly expressed in the constitution of 2012, Article 10 of which reads: “The family, whose foundations are religion, morals, and patriotism, is the basis of society. The state and society endeavor to preserve the genuine identity of the Egyptian family, to ensure its cohesion and independence, and to protect the stability of its ethical values.”Footnote 32
The Muslim Brotherhood's linkage of public order and the divinely revealed religions could well be seen as an attempt to further Islamize the concept. It could be seen as an attempt to move Egypt away from its ambiguous secular-Islamic nature toward a more concretely Islamic state. However, seeing it in terms of “Islamization” both implies a greater discontinuity between the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary order than is warranted. Rather, it is useful to think that such moves are an exercise of the state's right to clarify what is religious and what is not and what are legitimate religious groups and what are not. This is particularly pertinent given the statement that state institutions, the church, and al-Azhar should all have a role in the cohesion of the national fabric. By linking public order to a kind of religious sensibility and the divinely revealed religions, public order thus becomes a tool for a stronger emphasis upon the “religious” nature of the state and demonstrates the active principle of secular power.
Seeing such moves as constituting “Islamization” is also problematic because it assumes the stability of the category “Islam” and “Islamic law.” Designating certain religions as legitimate and others as not and using the power of the state to back such designations up, should not be seen as a simple consequence of the application of Islamic law. Indeed, the codification of such issues as the divinely revealed religions moves the sharī‛a away from its pre-modern or classical applications when the legal implications of the concept of the divinely revealed religions were far more ambiguous not to mention the fact that different schools of law took different positions on this question. In relation to questions of belief and unbelief, particularly apostasy, Johansen writes that the: “Muslim jurists of the premodern period had assigned ethical norms an important place and had clearly distinguished purely ethical from enforceable legal norms” (Johansen Reference Johansen2003, 687). However, when the modern nation state codified the law, this reduced Islamic law to personal statute law and the “state's written law abandoned the purely ethical norms of that tradition” thus creating “a new outlook on the legal and ethical tradition of Islam” (Johansen Reference Johansen2003, 688, 690). In the same way, Mahmood argues that “the telescoping of religious law into the domain of the family is not so much a violation of secular principles as it is a product of the simultaneous relegation of religion, family, and sexuality to the private sphere under the regime of modern governance” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2012, 58).
In moving for a constitutional commitment to the question of the divinely revealed religions, the Muslim Brotherhood was reinforcing the state's right to serve as arbiter on these matters and is therefore more in line with the nature of the modern state — and its regulatory capacities — than any pre-modern Islamic society.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, it is clear that understanding the Muslim Brotherhood in terms such as Islamist or secular or as an organization that threatens the civil nature of the state can only go so far. Such an explanation of current events in Egypt is insufficient because it assumes too much of a discontinuity between the policies of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak pre-revolutionary Egyptian state. In addition, it also assumes the analytical stability of the concepts of “religious,” “Islamic,” “civil,” and “secular.”
This is not to say that the Muslim Brotherhood's control of the People's Assembly and the Presidency did not result in discontinuities or that the changes to the constitution relating to religious freedom and the role of al-Azhar did not have important legal ramifications. However, the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement in the negotiations over the constitution — in particular its reinforcement of the right of the Supreme Constitutional Court to oversee legislation — and its reference to religion indicate that is was the process of reinforcing the principle of secular power. In this respect the emergence of the phrase “the Muslim Brotherhoodization of the state” “akhwanat al-dawla” is more perspicacious than “Islamization of the state.” Inheriting the modern nation state is something that in many ways the Muslim Brotherhood conditioned itself to do in the decade or so leading up to the revolution. By adopting the language of civil versus religious and arguing that it stood for a civil state as opposed to a religious state it defended itself against criticisms that were leveled against it. Yet, in adopting such language, it also adopted and reinforced the state's right to determine the boundaries of religion and politics and the boundaries of the religious and the civil. The Muslim Brotherhood therefore evolved to embrace secularism of a certain sort-a statism in which it is the state that determines the boundaries of religion and politics and therefore acts as the guardian over matters relating to religion, not in the sense of deciding upon the correct interpretation of doctrine as such, but in the sense of deciding what matters are to be considered religious or not and who or what ultimately has the right to decide on those matters. While fully accepting that it is the state's right to authorize the spaces that religion should inhabit, it was also in the process of renegotiating the secular settlement and was entangled in the question of where to draw the line between the two.
In the process of renegotiating the secular, the Muslim Brotherhood might not have implemented the kind of system that some of the revolutionaries had hoped for. Yet seeing such changes as a necessary consequence of the application of sharī‛a law gives insufficient attention to the challenges that face the project of codifying sharī‛a in the modern nation state. As Lombardi has shown, one can easily adopt a constitutional provision for sharī‛a, but “it can be very difficult for a country that has adopted such a provision to develop a policy implementing its command” (Lombardi Reference Lombardi2006, 270). Wael Hallaq argues that the Islamic state is an impossibility and a contradiction because the sovereign will of the state “knows only itself, deferring to nothing but itself” (Hallaq Reference Hallaq2013, 45). He contrasts the paradigm of the modern state (including those deemed Islamic states) with Islamic governance, which, he argues, is morally informed since “in the Sharī‛a the legal is the instrument of the moral and not the other way round” (Hallaq Reference Hallaq2013, 10). Certainly, the application of Islamic sharī‛a in the modern state, now that it has been separated from these particular institutions and discursive traditions, faces considerable challenges relating to the extent to which sharī‛a undergoes change when it comes entangled with legally enforceable law and the coercive power of the state. Future negotiations about what the boundaries of sharī‛a should be and how it relates to particular law and statues, negotiations that will involve the managing of the religious and the civil, will only continue to reinforce the principle of secular power.
