IF HE LED THE REFORM THE KID WOULD BECOME ACCEPTABLE:

The brotherhood is gathering outside the pharaoh's palace: The Mubarak regime is heading for a succession crisis. By trying to strangle Egypt's Islamists, it has strengthened them (Timothy Garton Ash, March 8, 2007, The Guardian)

Twenty-six years into the reign of President Mubarak, amendments are proposed to the constitution. Article 1, instead of reading "the Arab Republic of Egypt is a democratic, socialist state based on an alliance of the working forces of the people", is to say simply "the Arab Republic of Egypt is a democratic state, based on citizenship...". Socialism is being excised like the face of Isis at Philae. References to it are to be removed from nine other articles of the constitution.

Despite the opposition of secular and Coptic Christian politicians, article 2 will continue to describe Sharia as "the principal source" for Egyptian legislation. At the same time, by banning both political parties based on religion and independent candidates in presidential elections, the president's ruling National Democratic party aims to keep its principal enemy, the outlawed but popular Muslim Brotherhood, out of any future competition for legal political power. So it tries to embrace Islam while fighting Islamism.

Politics, seen from this perspective of 5,000 years of Egyptian history, is something very different from what you find in US civics textbooks. It's not about the installation of this or that logically and legally constructed political system, based on this or that ideology. It's about rulers borrowing, bending and merging gods, ideologies and legal systems, adapting to internal and external forces, mixing coercion and patronage, sharing some of the spoils where necessary, but always with the goal of maximising your own power and wealth, and hanging on to it for as long as possible - for yourself, and your children, and your children's children. Those who take the legitimating religion or ideology too seriously - be it Osirisism or socialism - are missing the point. The gods come and go; what endures over the millenia is men's lust for power and wealth, and their vain quest for immortality.

Which brings us back to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, who is 78 years old. Although he has been re-elected until 2011, a succession crisis - that bane of all authoritarian regimes - is looming. One thing that brought people onto the streets in the Kifaya (Enough!) protest movement, during the run-up to the presidential election in 2005, was the prospect that he might be grooming his son, Gamal Mubarak, to succeed him. "Despite the police, no to extension, no to succession!" chanted the veteran leftwing activist Kamal Khalil. "Oh, Egypt," he continued, "you still have a palace, you still have slums, tell those who live on Orouba [a boulevard in a neighbourhood with many grand houses, including the president's residence] that we live 10 to one room."

Mubarak's fear of the Muslim Brotherhood has served him poorly. He could have domesticated them by allowing them a share, though minor at first, of power. Instead he's reduced it to an either/or contest that his son doesn't seem adept enough to prevail in.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2007 9:59 PM