Theocracy in Egypt?

Five years ago, a group of archaeologists, led by Durham University’s Professor Robin Coningham, published an article in the journal Antiquity which raised a minor storm in social science circles. The article was entitled ‘The state of theocracy: defining an early mediaeval hinterland in Sri Lanka’.

The archaeologists were involved in a project, funded by Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, to excavate and examine Anuradhapura’s growth from an Iron Age village to a mediaeval city.

Their interim conclusion, published in the article, was that the hinterland of Anuradhapura functioned as a ‘theocratic landscape’.

In order to sort out the resultant furore, the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka arranged a meeting between Sri Lankan scholars and some of the article’s co-authors. The conclusion reached generally was that the term ‘theocracy’ was inappropriate in this context and could be used in a pejorative sense.

It is bearing this scholarly squabble in mind that the issue should be approached of the impending constitutional changes in Egypt. The main question exercising the Western media in regard to the newly elected government of President Mohamed Mursi seems to be whether or not he will establish an Islamic Theocracy.

Barack Obama

Mohamed Mursi

Mitt Romney

Judicial independence

According to Bloomberg, the American business media giant, the question is whether ‘Mursi, an Islamist from the Muslim Brotherhood... lacks commitment to judicial independence and other hallmarks of democracy.’ The congruence between Islamism and anti-democracy is implied. There is, in the Western media, an ‘unequal geopolitics in news reporting’, an ingrained set of biases against the Third World which are compounded by almost each additional news report or editorial opinion.

The extent of this bias can be seen, for example, in Britain’s Press Council which, a few years ago ruled that the ‘Independent’ newspaper was not wrong to state (without quoting any evidence) that Sri Lanka’s constitution discriminates against the minorities.

This prejudice is strongest against people of the Islamic faith. The implementation of Shari’a Islamic law is immediately considered to be the act of a ‘theocracy’ - making even Maldives to some extent theocratic. This preconceived notion is clearly unfair, considering that Western Law (and indeed even Sri Lanka’s) is rooted in Christian theology.

Retired Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby (a devout Anglican but a believer in the private nature of religion and an opponent of ‘god botherers’) has said that laws derived from the common law of England were ‘influenced by notions which were shared by the Christian churches and belief’. Indeed, English legislators considered the law to be preordained by God, their own task being merely to codify it.

This does not imply that secular Western countries such as the United States of America or Canada are theocracies. Nor should the application of Shari’a (much of the corpus of which is in fact rooted in the Judeao-Roman Christian tradition) necessarily mean that a state so doing is theocratic.

It is common to label modern Iran as a ‘theocracy’, because of its use of Shari’a, because Islam is written into a constitution and because the head of state is elected by an Islamic council. However, by the same token, England should also be deemed a theocracy, since the law is Christian (including specifically Christian blasphemy laws), Anglicanism is the established religion and the Head of State is the Supreme Leader of the Church of England, appointed monarch ‘by the grace of god’ and invested with veto powers.

Multi-party system

So no one should be surprised that the fears the Western media have regarding Mursi do not extend to Republican Party US Presidential contender Mitt Romney.

The latter hails from Utah, which has been called a theocracy - all of the state’s representatives in Congress, all of its Supreme Court, 90 percent of its legislature and 80 percent of its state and federal judges belong to the Mormon Church of the Latter day Saints.

Romney is a practising Mormon and former bishop, who has gone on record as criticising President Barack Obama for following ‘secular’ policies. Yet the Western media do not see him as an American Mursi.

Although former dissident Ayman Nur has told ‘Voice of Russia’ radio that Mursi had given guarantees regarding a multi-party system and for equal rights for religious minorities and for women, the Western media continues to harp on Mursi’s Islamicism.

The underlying truth is that Egypt, like Iran before it, has emerged from a decades-long oligarchic dictatorship backed by a ruthless security and secret police network.

After the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the state nationalised the commanding heights of the economy and began an era of social welfare and held democratic elections.

The Western media fear a repeat of the Iranian revolution. How better to drown the social and economic implications of Egypt’s democratic transformation than to wheel on the colonial-era weapon of colour bar, modernised slickly as a defence of the alleged Western values of human rights and secularism.