❊ Fake Muslim Moderates

I don’t want to get into the details of the fracas in Cairo between Muslims and Christians, but how this develops can affect me as an Arab Muslim who believes in liberal democracy.

Here’s the thing: Up to now, the Arab world has never known a majority Muslim country which had a real democracy. And by real democracy, I don’t mean one where a majority rules (which is what many naive Muslims believe democracy is all about) , but one where the minorities have the exact same basic rights (worship, education, free speech) as the majority.

There seems to be a misunderstanding of what a real Muslim moderate is. A Muslim moderate is not someone who thinks “They’re building a church, I will sacrifice my personal opinion of such apostasy and get along with it. They’ll eventually rot in hell anyway” , but someone who thinks “They’re building a church, I can build a mosque, we’re all entitled to pray as we want because we’re all equal under the law”.

There are many Egyptian “moderates” who sincerely condemned the bombing of the Egyptian church on that fateful New Year’s eve (which as it now seems set the tone for 2011). But as Al-Ahram commentator Hani Shukrallah noted:

I accuse the millions of supposedly moderate Muslims among us; those […] who would rise up in fury over a decision to halt construction of a Muslim Center near ground zero in New York, but applaud the Egyptian police when they halt the construction of a staircase in a Coptic church in the Omranya district of Greater Cairo.

It was refreshing to see Egyptian Muslims and Christians chanting together in Tahrir square that they are one hand, a hand that is going to build a better Egypt. It was refreshing because Egypt had the potential of emerging as the model we never had. (Lebanon is an exception in many ways, and we can’t really think of it as a typical “majority Muslim country”)

It is insulting to me as a Muslim to learn that for every majority Muslim “democratic” rule, there has to be a heavy-handed army that has to intervene to literally prevent Muslims from killing Christians (or Jews, Baha’is, Ahmedis, or atheists). I had high hopes for Egypt, and it will be a real tragedy if Egypt just ended up being one more of the same..