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.

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.

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.