One quarter of the Egyptian Parliament should be elected on a constituency basis, one quarter elected on a proportional basis, forty-five per cent (an equal number of men and women) nominated by the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and five per cent (an equal number of men and women) nominated by the Coptic Patriarch.
No legislation could be introduced unless sponsored by at least one MP from each of those four categories, nor could it be enacted without the approval of all four of the General Guide, the Patriarch, and the first and second-placed candidates in a direct Presidential election, termed the President and the Vice-President but enjoying exactly equal powers. Why not?
On social justice issues, the Muslim Brotherhood is not what it was, having changed direction to recant the public ownership and the wealth redistribution for which it used to campaign, and to support Mubarak's land reform reversals. But it could easily be talked into changing back, especially since it is by no means clear how convinced the party at large has ever been about these revisions at the top. Remind you of anyone?
If Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, and the Lebanese coalition including Hezbollah are anything to go by, then the Copts are very well-placed to strike an excellent deal, in stark contrast to our beloved Israel, Turkey and Mubarak.
And the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by British intelligence in order to agitate against independence, has always enjoyed excellent Foreign Office connections. So Commonwealth membership beckons, especially for a country which even still has a currency called the pound.
This is Britain's moment. Otherwise, such are the historic ties and the widespread proficiency in English, that we should expect each of our cities to contain several, and each of our large towns to contain one, of those Coptic churches. One tenth of the Egyptian population would have decamped to the most obvious alternative country from their point of view.
As with the Arabs inside Israel's 1948 borders, why did we not do for them what we later did for the East African Asians, but a generation earlier, when we were still just about in a position to back it up?
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Not until we have a government who have ever heard of Middle Eastern Christians.
ReplyDeleteGeorge Bush and Tony Blair probably did not know that there were Christian communities in the Middle East, and no doubt imagine even now that they are made up only of very recent converts served by missionaries who have arrived since the “liberation” of Iraq.
ReplyDeleteTheir neoconservative puppet-masters relied on that, and the corresponding popular, ignorance in order to use those communities as bait for the jihadis whom they knew would pour into Iraq if the Ba’ath regime were removed, the easier to kill them.
Although at an academic level Evangelicalism is returning to its more cerebral roots within the Great Tradition, at any popular level the existence of Christian communities going all the way back to the Day of Pentecost remains almost unknown.
The forms that they take make them as unmentionable as the Sub-Apostolic Fathers, with their matter-of-fact presentation of all things “Romish” as the context presupposed by the New Testament text, even by those who are aware of them.
And that ridiculous, utterly anti-intellectual nineteenth-century aberration, Dispensationalism, remains staggeringly influential.
Mind you, I am not sure what the excuse of Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and latterly also Frenchmen and those with roots in German Christian Democracy, can possibly be.
Truly, the son of an old Egypt and Palestine hand during the War.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, indeed.
ReplyDeleteWhen are you Papists going to give back Saint Mark from Venice to Alexandria? And do you think that this twin proposed political arrangement could work in Israel, too?
ReplyDeleteI hardly think that the Venetians will be sending Saint Mark back to the Alexandrians any time soon.
ReplyDeleteOn your second point, I'd have to give that a lot more thought. Who, exactly, would fulfil the roles of the Supreme Guide and the Coptic Patriarch, and why?