I have just published a post on the first six months of Morsi’s administration, at the valuable blog, rebeleeconomy.com, on the invitation of its founder, Farah Halime.  This is part I of the essay. Part II, inshallah, will appear next week.

I have just published a post on the first six months of Morsi’s administration, at the valuable blog, rebeleeconomy.com, on the invitation of its founder, Farah Halime.  This is part I of the essay. Part II, inshallah, will appear next week.

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. 

Egypt is in the grip of another in a series of what appear to be unending crises threatening the viability of a transition to a democratic order.  This current crisis is the result of the interaction of three factors: the first is the inability of the constituent assembly to reach a consensus on provisions in the constitution dealing with the role of Islam in the state and the extent of individual freedoms.  That this should have been a stumbling block could hardly have come as a surprise to anyone with an inkling of knowledge of Egyptian political history over the last 75 years.   The second is the looming threat that the Supreme Constitutional Court could dissolve the Constituent Assembly on the grounds that because it was appointed by a parliament which was itself dissolved, it lacks valid legal authority to perform its work.  The third is the omnipresent threat of imminent economic collapse if the Egyptian state cannot reconstitute itself in a reasonably timely fashion, something that must have been a precipitating factor in President Morsi’s sweeping decrees of last week.

The problem in Egypt is that there is a giant ultimatum game going on, with the opposition threatening to deny the legitimacy of the constitution by walking out and convincing the SCC to invalidate the CA; well, it turns out that Morsi knows how to deploy a tit-for-tat strategy in the context of an ultimatum game, and people are surprised.  Hmm. 

Christina Lagarde, head of the IMF, was in Egypt today to negotiate with the Egyptian government the terms of a new $4.8 billion loan.  Predictably, many Egyptians are suspicious.  An Egyptian economist, Wael Gamal, who has solid revolutionary credentials and is economically progressive, writes on Egypt’s economic affairs for al-Shuruq, a leading independent Egyptian newspaper.  He has come out strongly against the proposed loan, first, in a piece in the Shuruq, and again on his blog.

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. 

Today’s remarkable decisions by the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt has dramatically upped the ante in Egypt’s runoff election between Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, and Ahmed Shafik, the self-styled populist, Egyptian nationalist and plutocrat.  I do not wish to engage in a forensic analysis of what happened between February 11, 2011 and today in order to explain how Egypt got to this point or point fingers of blame.  The crucial issue now is what is the best course for Egyptians who are anti-ancien regime and wish to see Egypt progress into something resembling a progressive and prosperous republic in which all its citizens enjoy respect and basic rights.