It was the option advocated by the secularists and the Writers’ Union; It circumvents the established rule in preparing constitutions in all countries of the free and developed world, which is that the Constitution Drafting Committee is a committee directly elected by the people. It was agreed that parliamentary elections would be held first, then Parliament would elect the Constitution Drafting Committee second, so it would be of two levels. In the event that the people reject the constitution, the members of the committee would be directly elected from among the people. Unfortunately, the position of the Writers Union supported the secularists and those with them from the remnants of Mubarak’s regime, and this is the opposite of the position they took after the coup, with the Constitution Committee formed by interim President Adly Mansour, after the July 2013 coup, as it brought in figures affiliated with the coup authority, and the Writers Union supported it, and it is an appointed committee and not elected in any way, which means that it is a clear disbelief in freedoms and the foundations of making constitutions. In the 2012 Constitution Committee, the Writers Union refused to elect members of the committee from the People’s Assembly, and demanded that the various federations, unions, and civil bodies nominate those who represent them in this committee, so that the members of the People’s Assembly and the Shura Council would elect whomever they saw fit based on these nominations, in accordance with the Constitutional Declaration that gave the elected members of the People’s Assembly and the Shura Council the right to vote. This is a clear circumvention, and its purpose is clear, because the majority of federations, unions, and bodies are known to have had improper boards of directors. Democratic, during the dominance of the authority of the formerly dissolved National Party and its arms emanating from it, and it is known that the authority before the January Revolution confiscated, nationalized, and fought any democratic elections in unions and federations. As for the Writers Union’s nomination of ten writers to participate in the Constitution Committee, this is good, provided that it is not a sword directed at the People’s Assembly, especially since the members of the Union as a whole do not exceed three thousand members at the time, at a time when we find unions whose members reach millions, such as the teachers’ union or the workers’ unions. The issue is not the bodies, but the democratic choice itself. In conclusion, the battle was over the future identity of Egypt. Will it be an identity with an Islamic reference or a secular orientation? This is what the Writers Union clarified in a statement issued on 3/18/2012 AD, in which it stated: “The Union affirms its rejection of the formation of the Constitution Committee from representatives of Parliament, and since the law stipulates that self-election is not permissible, the Union demands the necessity of its participation in this historic committee, according to a specific number of ten prominent writers and creative thinkers, as is the case in all constitutions and similar to what happened in the 1954 Constitution Committee, where the committee included senior writers who were in the Their forefront is Taha Hussein, Abdul Rahman Badawi, Ahmed Lotfi Al-Sayyid… and others, even though the number of its members did not exceed fifty members.” ([1]). It goes without saying that the regime of July 1952 was not democratic in the first place, and that the aforementioned committee was formed by the authority of the Free Officers, so it is no wonder that it brought in its loyalists, the ultra-secularists, and excluded the Islamists, and the names mentioned in this statement are known to be supportive of the authority, whether in the era of monarchy and occupation or in the era of the July coup and the Free Officers. Ahmed Lotfy Al-Sayyid is secular to the core, and is called the professor of the generation and the father of Egyptian liberalism. Rather, he was demanding the continuation of the British occupation of Egypt, so that the Renaissance would be at the hands of the British because they were advanced. The Umma Party that he established was loyal to the British occupier. He also called for the use of colloquial language as an alternative to classical Arabic, and called for the study of Greek philosophy as a basis for the Renaissance. As for Taha Hussein, his secular stances are well known. He is a student of Lutfi al-Sayyid, and he was one of those affiliated with the royal palace, and one of the extreme secularists. Taha Hussein is considered to be the first to call the Free Officers Movement the title of a revolution, to be the first of the intellectuals to side with the new authority, and to reserve an early seat on its train. He held positions in the Officers’ Republic under his leadership as editor of Al-Jumhuriya newspaper for seven years, and his presidency of the Arabic Language Academy, among others. While Abd al-Rahman Badawi represents secular philosophical thought, he is one of the promoters of the philosophy of existentialism, although he is not completely loyal to authority, but he does not oppose it. The battle continues, as the head of the union, Mohamed Salmawi, who was completely submissive during the era of Hosni Mubarak, and was chosen as president of the Writers’ Union because he is one of the most prominent supporters of the authority of the National Party, Salmawi publishes a statement in his name, on 6/8/2012 AD, in which it says: “I am appalled, as are all other writers in Egypt, by the formation that resulted in the negotiations of the political forces with the parliamentary majority regarding the founding committee for the constitution, as it was completely devoid of writers who are the conscience of the nation.” And its thinking mind, the formation was mindless and unrepresentative of the thinkers, writers, and intellectuals of this nation, whose number among the ninety million people of Egypt is greater than the number of some of the countries that are full members of the United Nations. The religious majority in Parliament launched a fierce campaign against the document and dropped it, so that it alone took control of the formation of the committee. We wrote at the time to the Speaker of the People’s Assembly, Muhammad Saad al-Katatni, personally rejecting this method and stressing the necessity of the formation coming from representatives of civil organizations and bodies that express its views. All factions and sects of the people. We presented ten names of prominent writers and thinkers who are members of the Egyptian Writers Union and who are internationally acclaimed, but the religious majority in Parliament went so far as to reject them all. For the benefit of parliamentarians and those who claim that teaching the English language is forbidden. The court’s ruling came to confirm that this formation, which the parliamentary majority went for, was illegal, which led us to the third attempt that we are currently making, in which we did not imagine that the failure that came at the hands of those seeking to seize everything would be repeated. The recent formation reached by the political forces with the parliamentary majority stipulated the specific unions and professional unions that would participate in the committee, and the name of the Egyptian Writers Union was not among them. It should be noted that the committee that drafted the 1954 constitution, which is considered the best constitution in our modern era, was composed of fifty people – not a hundred – and it included no less than ten names of writers, writers, and thinkers.”([2]). In our analysis of this statement, we will find specific vocabulary and terminology, including “the religious current and the religious majority,” so that the battle becomes blatant, between a religious trend and another secular, worldly one, which is an incorrect use. The religious/Islamic trend included scholars, researchers, politicians, and popular and national symbols, with its own struggle against tyranny. He referred to the Speaker of the People’s Assembly, Katatni, who is a well-known scholar and university professor, a former member of the People’s Assembly (2005 AD) and one of the most skilled politicians. This and other sheikhs? Or from the sect of muezzins whom he referred to mockingly in the statement, as if the Islamists were in the end a group of imams of mosques, preachers and muezzins, which means that Salmawi did not bother himself – as required by fairness and objectivity – to get to know the type of personalities in the alleged religious majority, nor their actions, nor their backgrounds, nor their struggle, nor their thought and patriotic giving. It also refers back to the 1954 Constitution, and the committee that was formed from the Free Officers, without an election at all. However, the constitution that was completed by the esteemed committee was thrown in the garbage, and its draft was found by Professor Salah Issa, and he published it in a book entitled “A Constitution in the Garbage” in 2001 AD.[3]). The funny thing is that the officers of July did not care at all about the achievement of the Constitutional Committee that they formed, and it took 18 months to complete its work. Rather, they tried to attack the scholar and jurist Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhouri Pasha, Chairman of the State Council, when he refused to take an unconstitutional measure, and he was the only national figure with an Islamic orientation in this committee. The attack was received by one of the messengers at the State Council, and al-Sanhouri Pasha was not able to leave the scene of the attack until after the arrival of Sagh Salah Salem, who accompanied him. To the outside, and Al-Sanhouri – according to one story, covered with a carpet from the Council’s offices)[4]As for the neglected constitution, it included basic freedoms, political rights, and a democratic system, which hastened its neglect. As Salah Montaser points out, there is another main reason, which is represented by Article (90) stipulating that the age of the person elected as President of the Republic must not be less than forty-five years, and Article (91) made his selection come by secret ballot from a body that includes members of Parliament and three delegates from each electoral district and from every body or union. Certainly, when Abdel Nasser looked at the two articles, he quickly threw the project into the nearest rubbish bin because, in his view, it was not fit for discussion. There was not a single one of the group of young military men who carried out the revolution and aspired to rule Egypt over the age of thirty-five. The only one who could meet the 45-year-old requirement was, ironically, Major General Mohamed Naguib, whom Abdel Nasser was preparing to get rid of at that time.[5]). As for Salmawi’s protest of excluding writers from the Constitution Drafting Committee, it is acceptable and he certainly has the right, but he does not have the right to describe writers as being alone “the nation’s conscience and thinking mind, which made the formation of the Constitution Committee mindless and unrepresentative of the thinkers, writers, and intellectuals of this nation.” This is slander and severe injustice to the rest of the members of the scholars, researchers, and politicians, of whom the Constituent Assembly was formed to write the 2012 Constitution, and among its most prominent figures: Waheed Abdel Majeed (academician). A well-known liberal politician), Muhammad Abu Al-Ghar (a professor of medicine and a famous liberal), Al-Sayyid Al-Badawi (head of the Wafd Party), Muhammad Amara (a well-known Islamic thinker), Farouk Juwaida (a famous poet), Amr Al-Shoubaki (a politician and academic), and many others. Hence, we can call the position of the Writers Union, represented in its successive statements, as having a “one-eyed narcissistic eye,” because it expresses the crisis of the majority of the leaders of the literary and secular movement in Egypt and the Arab world on the media fronts. Each individual among them sees himself as the only thinker, rationalist, and keen on renaissance and progress, and those who belong to it are lost in pride and arrogance as if they are the only ones aware of philosophy and enlightenment, and each one of them feels that he is a pole of the world. And his statements are the truth, while they accuse their Islamist opponents of rigidity and reactionaryism, and confine them to mosques and worship, not taking into consideration that some of them are distinguished and accomplished and prominent in their scientific specializations, and have their societal standing. This is the crisis of the secularists in general, as they do not see anyone else in the arena, and even the secularists who joined the committee to write the 2012 constitution, they withdrew before the final approval, with the aim of embarrassing the authority, and thwarting the whole matter, and forcing the Constituent Assembly to complete its path, after including the reserves in the membership of the committee, and then finally approving the constitution. The crisis lies in limiting the opinion of the Writers Union to the issue of representation and the like, and for those who look at the positive articles that made the 2012 Constitution one of the best constitutions in the history of Egypt, because of its emphasis on freedoms, guarantee of democracy, and the quest to modernize the state, and the distribution of power between the president and the prime minister, but they were content with what was external and formal, represented by the formation of the committee and its members, and questioning the intentions of the nascent Islamic parties that won the majority in the democratically elected parliament, and that is the dilemma, which I see that it goes back to the position of the secularists in general regarding the Islamic project, and that they prefer dictatorship over any democratic life that may bring their opponents from the Islamic trend, in addition to their self-aggrandizement that the Constitutional Committee and the Presidency of the Republic come with great participation from this trend, which they have continued to attack and belittle them, and they received positions and gifts from the sponsors of the coup and tyranny, and they sat on the facades of the media in return.
[1]) Writers Union website (old), access date 20/ 5/ 2019, http://egwriters.com/ar/?pg=pressReleases&item_id=204&page_id=6
[2]) Writers Union website (old), access date 20/ 5/ 2019, http://egwriters.com/ar/?pg=pressReleases&item_id=445&page_id=5
[3]Constitution in the Garbage Bin, Salah Issa, Cairo Center for Human Rights, 2001 AD.
[4]) A history of the prosperity and collapse of the Egyptian legal elite, Amr Al-Shalakany, Al-Ahram newspaper, 10/10/2012 AD. https://www.shorouknews.com/columns/view.aspx?cdate=10102012&id=b2438afe-51ef-4cf0-98bf-3935fda4ecd4
[5]This is why Abdel Nasser threw Constitution 54 in the garbage. Salah Montaser, Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, 3/12/2012.
https://www.almasryalyoum.com/news/details/53352
