The New Yorker has a brief piece on the views of Mohammed Abu al-Ghar, whom it describes as a lynchpin of Egypt’s liberals and emblematic of their support for the military.  In it, he admits that he and other decision-makers contemplated the possibility of a substantial number of deaths from the very moment the decision was made to move against the protesters.  But what kind of justification is given for this?  He absurdly claims that Morsi was much worse than Nixon, and Americans refused to let Nixon complete his term.

Those inclined to blame Morsi and the MB for all that has happened focus on his refusal to move forward with early presidential elections. I have been trying to get an answer to this question for a long time, and no one, as far as I know, has bothered to attempt an answer: by what legal authority could Morsi have set new elections? There was a law governing presidential elections (which I believe was in fact drafted by none other then the current interim president, Adli Mansur), and the constitution even set out the timing of presidential elections. Assuming that early presidential elections was constitutionally feasible, a law authorizing such elections would have had to be passed. I’m not arguing that Morsi would have done so; I think there are good reasons why the MB feared early presidential elections, at least in the absence of a parliament, but as I recall events during the #Jan25 revolution, people were very concerned that Mubarak’s resignation would cause a constitutional crisis. Persons like Hossam Bahgat even wrote a column in the Washington Post addressing the constitutional crisis that would arise if Mubarak simply left.

I have read reports that Morsi was indeed willing to resign once a parliament had been elected precisely to avoid a constitutional crisis that would allow for the return of military rule. This was not an unreasonable position, if true. Whatever one’s views of Morsi or the MB, did we Egyptians not at least owe it to ourselves to exhaust constitutional possibilities prior to empowering the police and the army, with an all too predictable result?

Perhaps the MB would not respect election results, God knows, but they would have no standing at that point. Now, they are martyrs and Egypt stands at the precipice of collapse.

I originally had hoped to publish this as an op-ed somewhere, but events are spiralling out of control so quickly in Egypt that the concerns I raise here seem so trivial as to be almost laughable.  Nevertheless, since I wrote it, I decided I might as well post it on my blog.

I contributed a post to There is Power in the Blog: Political Theology with the title “Legitimacy, Revolution and State Formation in Sunni Political Theology” that discusses the tension in Sunni political theory between the idea of the legitimate ruler and the usurper, and applies these concepts to the current crisis in Egypt.

Over the past ten days, I read the highly informative work of the late Samer Soliman, “Autumn of Dictatorship.”  The book provides a detailed analysis of the political economy of the Mubarak regime and its various crises as it attempted to deal with the systematic decline of rents available to the Egyptian state. During that time, I tweeted various crucial points from the book. I thought it would be useful to put them all together in one blog post.

Last night, I had the honor of breaking my fast with a leading contemporary muhaddith, the Syrian scholar Salah al-Din al-Idlibi.  At the time, I did not know his stature as a modern scholar of hadith, but left the evening truly impressed with his demeanor, impressive command of the sources and the objective tone to which he answered the numerous questions which were directed to him by his dinner companions.  One of them was a recent convert who had a host of obscure questions related to theology and hadith, all of which he handled with extreme adeptness.  One of the questions we discussed was the age of al-Sayyida Khadija when she married the Prophet (S).  In a manner that I can only describe as iconoclastic, he explained why he thought it was extremely implausible that she was 40 when the Prophet (S) married her.  He pointed out this report was based on a poorly-documented report (da’if), and that there were other reports that put her age in the much more plausible range of the mid-20’s which would have made her about the same age as the Prophet (S) at the time of their marriage.  He justified his view based on the implausibility of a woman bearing six children, born separately, after the age of 40.  This discussion offered me the opportunity to raise the problem of age generally for the first generation of Muslims, especially since the Arabs before Islam did not have a regular calendar, and the question of Aisha’s age.  I mentioned that there was a hadith in Sahih Muslim which stated that she participated in the Battle of Uhud by tending to the wounded and bringing water to the soldiers.  I said it seemed implausible that a girl of 10 could be doing these things, especially since we know that the Prophet (S) prohibited ‘Abdallah b. ‘Umar from participating in that battle, even though he was a teenager at the time.  In any case, he mentioned to me that he had written a short essay on the question of ‘Aisha’s age and that he would send it to me in due course.

When I woke up this morning, I found that he had sent me, as promised, the short essay he had written on the issue.  In it he concludes that based on all available historical reports, ‘Aisha was fourteen at the time her marriage was contracted to the Prophet (S) and that she did not begin her married life until she was eighteen. He concludes that the narration in Bukhari and Muslim in which she reports that her marriage was contracted at the age of six and the she entered the Prophet’s (S) house at 9 is in all probability a mistake (wahm) in transmission, perhaps from Aisha herself if she reported it in her old age.  I found the analysis very considered and persuasive.  For those interested, here is a link to the essay, which I reproduce with his gracious permission.

One of the most basic reasons why my judgment on events in Egypt during its post-Mubarak transition differs from that of others is my relative pessimism on what can be achieved in the short-term, other than simply securing the foundations for formal democracy.  Based on that starting point, I have given President Morsi wide leeway, because it seems to me that what he has been attempting to do is no more than establish the foundations for a formal democratic regime, one that no doubt will be greatly troubled and flawed, and will certainly fall short of the aspirations of many “revolutionaries,” particularly the youthful vanguard.

Part II of my discussion of Morsi’s performance after six months is now up on rebeleconomy.com.

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.