Egyptians are on the verge of civil war because they cannot seem to agree on the text of a constitution.  For the most part, the disagreements that threaten to tear the country apart center around rights, more specifically, the role of religion in the modern Egyptian state.  This debate essentially finds most traction in two contexts, gender rights, and freedom of religion. 

Egyptians are on the verge of civil war because they cannot seem to agree on the text of a constitution.  For the most part, the disagreements that threaten to tear the country apart center around rights, more specifically, the role of religion in the modern Egyptian state.  This debate essentially finds most traction in two contexts, gender rights, and freedom of religion. 

A few days ago, I tweeted that Egypt was in a Hobbesian moment, not a Rawlsian one, and that Egypt’s draft constitution ought to be evaluated in light of that fact. 

Does Islamic law have a conception of sovereign immunity? Yes, and it is derived from the notion of the public official as a public agent.  This relationship defines both why it is obligatory to obey lawful acts of a public agent.– because one is always bound by the lawful acts taken by one’s own agent — and why one is not bound by the ruler’s unlawful acts — because an agent’s unlawful acts are beyond the scope of his agency and are thus that of a private person and not of an agent. 

Morsi, as a result of his recent constitutional declaration, has been accused of attempting to acquire dictatorial powers.  The Roman Republic, however, instituted dictatorship as a regular constitutional tool to deal with war time emergency.  Does the Roman Republic’s institutionalization of the dictatorship provide any lessons for the current Egyptian transition?

The Egyptian Constitutional Assembly has finally completed a draft constitution for post-revolutionary Egypt, issuing it to the Egyptian public for their consideration almost a month ago.  (An English translation of the draft may be found here.)  As is the case with everything in post-revolutionary Egypt, the draft has proven to be extremely controversial, and has elicited widespread criticism, particularly from human rights organizations for its failure to meet international norms with respects to rights of women, children and freedom of religion.  Ellis Goldberg, meanwhile, has published a lengthy and very thoughtful analysis of the draft text in two parts on his blog, Nisr al-Nasr (Part I and Part II).

Today’s New York Times has a front page story on the accelerating advancement of robotics and the prospect that these advanced robots will very soon replaces millions of low-skilled workers around the world.  No doubt, workers look at this possibility with trepidation: as these robots become cheaper and more efficient, low-skilled workers will face the prospect of either accepting lower wages in return for keeping their jobs, or find something else to do.  Yet, it was not so long ago when we did not view technological progress as the zero-sum game depicted in this article: many people assumed that as technology became more productive, human beings would be liberated from the drudgery of production and enjoy ever increasing amounts of leisure to engage in, well, whatever they wanted: fish in the morning and engage in literary criticism in the afternoon, for example.  Karl Marx, of course, attempted to lay out a theory for why such a future was inevitable: as the contradictions between the capacity for the rational deployment of capital to banish scarcity and the relative impoverishment of the working classes become more and more apparent, the system of unlimited private accumulation of capital would become unsustainable, and a social revolution would inevitably ensue.  A new world would come into being in which the irrationality of unlimited private accumulation would be replaced by a system that deployed capital for the social benefit of all.  Marx’s view of history has turned out to be either hopelessly naive, or too far ahead of its time, depending on one’s point of view, but when one reads about the ever-increasing capabilities of automated production, one really must begin to re-think radically the future possibilities of human life: why should the gains derived from these incredible gains in productivity be monopolized by the owners of private capital?  Wouldn’t we in fact live in a better world if we encouraged the development of technologies that liberated humans from the back-breaking drudgery of berry-picking, for example, rather than the next iteration of the iPhone?  If we agree that humans are capable of a lot more than simply doing repetitive tasks all day long, 40-hours a week (or however long the relevant work week is), shouldn’t we welcome these developments and seek to replace human labor with machine labor at every turn?  The answer is obviously yes, but with one very important caveat: we must abandon the logic of perpetual and unlimited accumulation of private capital and, instead of thinking of what new drudgery can be invented to replace the old, we should think of how these productivity gains could be used to allow individuals to pursue their own goals, rather than those of private capital.

Or so says Mormon theology, if this article from TruthOut is to be believed. So it turns out that Romney was not only kissing Sheldon Adelson’s butt for money, but also because he thinks they are part of a holy if not sacred lineage. Adelson’s holy lineage apparently makes it OK for the family values party to accept millions of dollars from a casino magnate: who cares what you do if you have the right descent? This is just another good reason, I’d say, to favor the exclusion of religion from public debate.

And, I will happily say, thank God I am a Muslim, where God teaches us that the only relevant distinction among human beings is in moral excellence:

“Ya ayyuha al-nasu, inna khalaqnakum min dhakarin wa untha wa ja`alnakum shu`uban wa qaba’ila li-ta`arafu inna akramakum ‘inda allahi atqakum” — “O people! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. The noblest among you in God’s sight is the most mindful of God.” Quran, al-Hujurat (the Chambers), 49:13.

Many revolutionaries who voted for Shafik, or who abstained or nullified their vote, did so on the grounds that they were defending the idea of a “civil” state.  This suggests that, in their mind, there are only two kinds of states in the world: “civil” states and “religious” states. 

I presented this paper in the fall of 2009 at a conference on minorities and Islamic law in Kuala Lampur sponsored by the Muslim World League and the International Islamic University.  It was my first time in Malaysia, but given the time difference (13 hours), I didn’t get much of an opportunity to see much of Malaysia.  In any case, it appears that my paper will be published along with some of the other papers presented at that conference.  This amounts to a pleasant surprise.

There is little doubt that religious commitments often conflict with political ones, at least in circumstances where religious commitments are considered to be transcendental, and at least some of them will ultimately be non-negotiable for their adherents. In Islam, the prohibition against intentionally killing other Muslims or waging war against them are examples of such commitments Muslims may have that can cause them to question the validity of certain political obligations.  This dilemma has become even more acute for American Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the decision of the United States government to fight a global war on “terrorism” which goes well-beyond the immediate perpetrators of 9/11.  In these circumstances, and particularly because many Muslims feel obligations of solidarity with other Muslims they are under attack, e.g., ‘Iraq, what is the responsible course of conduct for American Muslims?  In this essay published first in the Islamic Monthly, I put forward an argument that requires American Muslims to create a language of critical citizenship, one that incorporates Islamic moral concerns in a critique of US policy, but at the same time transforms Islamic moral concerns into more universal ones, with the hope of creating a political discourse that reconciles the political values of modern liberal citizenship with the political values of Islam.