Painful Truths

Egyptian Islamist advocates female genital mutilation

Female circumcision is part of the prophetic Sunnah, said MP Nasser al-Shaker of the Salafi-led Nour Party, who previously proposed a bill that would allow the practice.

On a morning show on Mehwar satellite TV station, Shaker said notable Egyptian scholars have said the practice is part of the Sunnah.

Imam Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, Abdel Halim Mahmoud, former Islamic Research Academy member Sheikh Attiya Saqr and former Egyptian Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel — all prominent Egyptian religious figures, the first three of whom have died — had all authorized the practice, also known as female genital mutilation, Shaker said.

via www.egyptindependent.com

Repulsive, misogynist creeps they may be, but there's something you've got to admire about Egypt's Islamists.

Without a care in the world, they're behaving as if there's no world out there. As with the Israelis and North Koreans, they're don't give a cahoot about what the world thinks about them (I won't even bother mentioning concepts such as equality and human rights, which are completely alien to them). As far as they're concerned, they're the centre of the world, they have a monopoly over the truth, they're all that matters and that's all that's to it.

So, less than a month after reports emerged that Egyptian Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood MPs proposed to legalise necrophilia and paedophilia – reports which the Salafi al-Nur party and the Muslim Brotherhood have still not denied – a Salafi MP is now proposing to reintroduce female genital mutiliation on the grounds that the Prophet Muhammad thought it was cool.

Why, you may ask, are the Islamists so preoccupied with matters sexual and genital when Egypt is teetering on the brink of collapse politically and economically?

The answer is quite simple and probably unpalatable to the average Western liberal. As I said in a previous blog post,

...as anyone who has met Islamists would know, your typical male Islamist, whether Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi/Wahhabi or Al-Qaeda-type jihadist, is driven largely by sexual frustration and a chronic social ineptitude that makes it difficult for him to form relationships with women (hence the prevalence of homosexual acts among Islamists, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and leads to pathological misogyny.

But although your typical male Islamist may have difficulty relating to and sexually performing with women, he is expected to marry at least one wife and thereby meet one of the criteria for "respectability" (it's a bit like members of the British Conservative Party).

This expectation, however, creates its own problems: married but sexually inadequate, your typical Islamist is chronically insecure and haunted by the spectre of his wife (or wives) being unfaithful through dallying with more sexually capable "real men".

Preoccupied with matters sexual, the Islamist therefore sees female genital mutilation as the solution to his pathological insecurity, on the grounds that cutting off the female clitoris will remove her libido and make her less likely to go off with other men.

Is this primitive and disgusting or is this primitive and disgusting?

I've seen God but he isn't what you think

Don't get excited, I haven't seen anybody. But there's a thought that nags at me every time someone asks me whether or not I believe in God or every time I read something about the debate between believers and atheists.

Although I've never been a practising Muslim (not since I was a very young child, anyway), I am also reluctant to say that I am an atheist. In my opinion, to be an atheist one has to be able to demonstrate with certainty that there's no super entity out there.

No one has ever seen or heard from a super entity (or any other entity for that matter), but how can one actually prove there is nothing? Seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting nothing does not necessarily mean there is nothing.

For example, radio waves have always existed but no one knew they were there until they were discovered in the second half of the 19th century. Even today, if one were not told about radio waves or radio tuners (radios) that enable you to listen to human voices transmitted across the electromagnetic spectrum from near and afar, one would never know they were there. So, in this situation if one where asked "Do you believe there are human voices among us here, this very minute", one could reasonably answer with a categorical negative: "I can't hear any voices and I can't see anyone talking, so no, I don't believe there are voices among us."

For the monotheistic religions, God is portrayed as a super, wiser, permanently-living version of us (or us an image of him as the religions would like to have it) but with a higher – indeed a perfect – moral code. He is both sexless (or at least celibate) and male, and he sees and hears everything we say and do but chooses not to be seen or heard.

While the flaws inherent in the monotheistic religions' image of God are challenging enough, the real problem arises when we try to match this God's supposedly super moral code and his high expectations of us mortals with his own behaviour and the nature of the environment he is said to have created. So, on the one hand we have his perfect code of ethics and on the other we have the world he has allegedly created where injustice and sadistic cruelty visited upon us by natural causes and disease reign supreme. Human behaviour aside, it is a world without mercy or compassion to any living creature.

In fact, it is much worse than this, for there is enough exhortation to evil in the supposedly divine scriptures to fundamentally destroy any pretence of goodness, godliness or morality in them. A case in point is the Ten Plagues in the Old Testament story of the Exodus. As the Israeli journalist and peace campaigner Uri Avnery put it,

Why were the entire Egyptian people punished for the misdeeds of one tyrant, Pharaoh? Why did God, like a divine Security Council, levy on them cruel sanctions, polluting their water with blood, destroying their livelihood with hail and locusts? And, even more gruesome, how could a merciful God send his angels to murder every single Egyptian firstborn child?

On leaving Egypt, the Israelites were encouraged to steal their neighbours’ property. It is rather curious that the Biblical story-teller, who was certainly deeply religious, did not omit this detail. And this just a few weeks before the Ten Commandments were handed down to the Israelites by God personally, including “Thou Shalt Not Steal”.

No one seems ever to have given much thought to the ethical side of the conquest of Canaan. God promised the Children of Israel a land which was the home of other peoples. He told them to kill these peoples, expressly commanding them to commit genocide. For some reason, He singled out the people of Amalek, ordering the Israelites to eradicate them altogether. Later, the glorious King Saul was dethroned by His prophet because he showed mercy and did not murder his Amalekite prisoners-of-war, men, women and children.

There are similar examples in the New Testament and in the Koran, but I think the Exodus story makes the point very well. The point is that the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam did not create us in his image but quite the reverse: we created him in our image.

Does that mean there is no God at all? Mindful of the radio waves example mentioned above, I am reluctant to say there is no God. However, it would be reasonable to say that the kind of God portrayed in the Old and New Testaments and in the Koran most likely does not exist.

Instead, it is possible that another type of entity does exist. If so, then all the evidence indicates that it won't have any conception of justice, compassion or right and wrong. It won't speak a language (languages are a product of evolution) or even be aware of its own existence.

It could be something like the sun or a star, or some other concentration of matter. At most, it could be some kind of engineer-entity, good at making things (by trial-and-error and over billions of years) but without even knowing what it is doing.

But a God in our image and with a code of ethics and sense of justice it ain't.

That, I fear, is the best we could hope for.

Egypt's Islamists seek to legalise necrophilia

In this age of 24-hour news, citizen journalism and ubiquitous means of disseminating and accessing news and information, it's hard to avoid matters that are shocking or upsetting.

However, now and again one stumbles upon news that is not just shocking or upsetting, but profoundly sickening – the kind of news that makes one want to vomit.

It comes as no surprise to me that the source of the latest vomit-inducing news is the Islamists – the half-witted, sexually-depraved, mentally-retarded Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis now in control of Egypt's parliament and sweeping across the political arenas of other Arab countries.

Today the website of Al-Arabiya TV channel reported that the Egyptian parliament is currently discussing two laws that would plunge the country to depths hitherto unknown to the human species. One law would permit a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death, and the other would lower the legal age of marriage for girls to 14 years.

According to Egyptian journalist Jabir al-Qarmuti, speaking on Egyptian ON TV on 24 April, the necrophilia draft law, dubbed the Farewell Intercourse Law, "is unbelievable. It is a catastrophe to give the husband such a right. Has the Islamic trend reached that far? ... Are there people thinking in this manner?”

The answer to both questions is yes. There is no limit to the depths to which Islamists will plunge. And yes, as anyone who has met Islamists would know, your typical male Islamist, whether Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi/Wahhabi or Al-Qaeda-type jihadist, is driven largely by sexual frustration and a chronic social ineptitude that makes it difficult for him to form relationships with women (hence the prevalence of homosexual acts among Islamists, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and leads to pathological misogyny.

In May 2011 a demented Moroccan cleric, Zamzami Abd-al-Bari, issued a religious ruling – a fatwa – saying that, in his learned view, necrophilia is permissible in Islam because marriage remains valid even after death. To allay suspicions that he might be acting in a sexist manner by conferring privileges on males only, the perverted cleric added that a woman also can engage in sex with her dead husband.

However, while the legal significance of Abd-al-Bari's religious ruling is no greater than his IQ, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafi co-legislators have taken one giant leap further by seeking to enshrine their depravity in law.

And it doesn't stop there. Instead of devoting their attention to Egypt's considerable problems – over-population, homelessness, grinding poverty, corruption, to mention but a fraction – the sexually-depraved misogynist perverts of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi al-Nur Party are launching an all-out onslaught on women's rights in Egypt. As Al-Arabiya put it, in addition to lowering to 14 years the legal age at which girls can marry,

They wish to cancel many, if not most, of the laws that promote women’s rights, most notably a law that allows a wife to obtain a divorce without obstructions from her partner. The implementation of the Islamic right to divorce law, also known as the khula, ended years of hardship and legal battles women would have to endure when trying to obtain a divorce.

Egyptian law grants men the right to terminate a marriage, but grants women the opportunity to end an unhappy or abusive marriages without the obstruction of their partner. Prior to the implementation of the khula over a decade ago, it could take 10 to 15 years for a woman to be granted a divorce by the courts.

While I feel sick at the mindless self-indulgence of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, I am also happy that the Islamists have embarked on a course that will eventually result in their political annihilation. In Egypt as in the rest of the Arab world, those who voted for the Islamists will have to taste their bitter poison before turning against them. In this way, the Islamists will eventually achieve what Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi failed to do with their repressive apparatuses. They will self-destruct.

Postscript

In the interest of fairness, I would highly recommend reading this related article, "Egypt 'necrophilia law'? Hooey, utter hooey", published in the Christian Science Monitor (CSM). 

I agree with CSM about media that publish and regurgitate stories without bothering to check the facts. However, one reason for this - which is also the reason why I published my blog post - is that, despite this story being reported in the Egyptian and international media, neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Salafis of al-Nur Party have denied it. They must know the damage it is doing to them, to Egypt and, indeed, to Islam as a whole, yet not a murmour of denial. So, what are we left to conclude other than that it is true?

David Cameron’s ridiculous address to “Islam”

An article in the British newspaper the Guardian on 12 April carried the headline: "Cameron calls on Islam to embrace democracy and reject extremism".

It said that the UK prime minister, who was on a visit to Indonesia, intended to declare in a speech that "Democracy and Islam can flourish together" and to tell the Muslim world that it can reject a "dead-end choice" between extremism and dictatorship.

What nonsense!

Whose "Islam" was Cameron intending to address and who represents it? Is it the "Islam" of Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi-Salafi retards? The relatively progressive "Islam" of Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the ruling Turkish Justice and Development Party? Or the Islam of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi villagers?

In any case, who does Cameron think is listening to him? Me? Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, Moroccan Justice and Charity Party leader Abdesslam Yassine or Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian Islamic theologian?

Yet, no one seems to be asking these questions. There is no single, agreed-upon version of "Islam". Muslims come in all shades of opinion and subscribe to radically different definitions of what constitutes a Muslim or a true believer.

A Muslim born and bred in Morocco has as much in common with an Indonesian Muslim as a British Christian has with a Christian from the Philippines.

Just imagine the ridicule that would be generated by a call by, let's say, Erdoğan, for Christendom to embrace ethics in politics.

Grow up, Cameron ‑ and other Western politicians ‑ and for once think and look beyond nonsensical sound bites.

The ugly face of evil

Abdallah al-Sanusi is "a thug who personally beat and abused prisoners". He was also Gaddafi's link man with the West who "reached out to influential Western academics in 2006 in an attempt to rebrand Gaddafi's image and promote 'the new Libya'". May his eventual death be long and painful.

You can read more about this thug in this article in the Guardian newspaper. But here is a taster of the man regarded as a hero by many in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as among the faux, self-styled "left" and "anti-imperialist" camp in the West.

Within Libya, Senussi built up a reputation as the brutal enforcer of Gaddafi's will when he was the chief of internal security during a deadly purge of regime opponents in the early 1980s.

Many hold him responsible for the massacre of about 1,200 inmates at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison in 1996. He is alleged to have given the order to guards standing on grated ceilings above the inmates to fire down on them after riots broke out over demands for better food and sanitary conditions.

The ICC [International Criminal Court] said Senussi was behind the killing of 13 demonstrators in Benghazi in 2006.

…Mustafa Jhyma, a resident of Tripoli, told Reuters: "Senussi is Gaddafi's black box, he has a lot of information. He has blood on his hands, he should be brought here and tried in Libya."

That "black box" may also contain secrets damaging to western governments. Senussi could be in a position to shed light on how much Britain and the US knew about the rendition and ill-treatment of prisoners in Gaddafi's Libya.

Senussi could have knowledge about Libyans kidnapped and assassinated in Europe and elsewhere during Gaddafi's rule, and the financing of terrorist organisations, especially in Africa.

Salafis are not Muslims, they are idolaters

We frequently hear about Salafis these days. They have made unexpectedly big gains in the Egyptian parliamentary elections and are rearing their heads wherever we look in the Arab world.

But who are they?

A lot has been written about Salafis and that other variant of their's, Wahhabism, which is prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula and has been aggressively exported by Saudis to Arab countries and other places as well, such as Bosnia, the Caucasus and sub-Saharan Africa.

The conventional definition of a Salafi, which comes from the Arabic world salaf, meaning ancestor, is one who believes that Muslims should follow the guidance of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, and that this following should be reflected not only in leading a similar life to Muhammad’s in terms of acts of worship and behaviour, but also in appearance. Hence, the wearing of baggy kaftans and the growing of unruly beards.

You can always spot Salafis by their unkempt appearance. The male would typically sport a wild, scruffy beard and the female would look like a sack of potatoes (see below).



But there is another way of looking at Salafis. They are idolaters. In appearance and behaviour, Salafis practice the very idolatry which the advent of Islam was supposed to have wiped out from the Arabian Peninsula and the countries that subsequently became Muslim. Here's why I think so

Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad, his successor, Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, who became the caliph, delivered his inaugural speech in which he said:

O' Muslims, those of you who worshipped Muhammad let them know that he is dead; but those of you who worshipped God let them know that He is Alive, and will never die.

My argument is that, through their obsession with imitating every aspect of the deceased prophet, especially what they believe he looked like, the Salafis have in fact turned him into a substitute for God. At best, they worship him as God's equal and, at worst, they worship him in place of God.

In other words, Salafis are not Muslims. They are idolaters who might as well go and worship statues, just as the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula did before Islam.

And we all know what God commanded Muslims to do with idolaters (for which you can read Salafis):

Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage...  [I]f they attack you put them to the sword. Thus shall the unbelievers be rewarded: but if they desist, God is forgiving and merciful. Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God's religion reigns supreme. But if they desist, fight none except the evil-doers (2:190–93).

Amen!

Egyptian hospital lets woman die because she can't afford admission

A woman died at the entrance of a private hospital in Alexandria after the hospital refused to admit her before paying a huge down payment that she could not afford, despite her poor condition.

Shaaban Morsi Saleh, 53, saw Sabah Mohamed Gad, 42, standing exhausted at the entrance of the Mabaret al-Asafra Hospital in Amreyya district that denied her entry.

via www.egyptindependent.com

Back in January 2008 I blogged about the lamentable absence of compassion in much of the world.

The subject of the blog post was a terminally ill Ghanaian woman deported from the UK but refused hospital treatment in her own country because she could not afford the exorbitant fees.

Commenting on this, I said:

In my own country ... we speak a lot about compassion, often citing the high value placed on it in the Koran. But at least in that spot of the Arab world, compassion is most conspicuous by its absence.

Sadly, nothing has changed. In a country that boasts about being the most pious in the Arab world and that has just voted in by a massive majority a bunch of charlatans from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi Al-Nour Party, basic human compassion is still a rarity.

Is this what Islam is all about?

Quran burning, bigotry and hypocrisy

Another day and more Muslim protests, deaths and injuries over the burning of copies of the Quran.

According to Reuters news agency and other media, at least four people were killed and 26 wounded during protests in Afghanistan today ("Four killed, many wounded in Afghan Quran protests").  As I write, other reports put the number of dead at seven.

US sources say the Qurans were "inadvertently" put in an incinerator at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan after officials believed Taliban prisoners were using the books to pass messages to each other.

This is not the first time that Muslims have protested, killed and got killed over Quran burning. In April last year seven foreign UN workers were killed during protests that raged across Afghanistan for three days after an American cretin, pastor Terry Jones, burned a Quran in Florida. At the time, I wrote a blog post ("God, Muslims and a moronic pastor from Florida"), in which I said:

Sadly, the anger of Muslims at the prospect of a half-wit burning copies of the Quran is a manifestation of the intellectual depths to which they have sunk, thanks to their primitive educational systems and authoritarian regimes that discourage any form of debate or curiosity beyond that of the most basic type. To many Muslims, Islam now boils down to a set of rituals, which they perform without actually knowing why, and dress restrictions that have no basis in religion. As for fundamentals such as justice, equality and the quest for knowledge, forget it.

Consequently, it is perhaps not all that surprising that my Muslim brothers and sisters are expending so much hot air because a second-class twerp has threatened to burn copies of the Quran. For it seems to me that along with justice, equality and the quest for knowledge, Muslims have also forgotten who exactly they worship: God or paper? If it is God that they worship, then why get so exercised by an ignoramus burning paper on which the Quran happens to be written? After all, don't Muslims also burn – no, blow up – copies of the Quran, destroy God's holy places of worship and kill fellow Muslims when they attack Sunni and Shi'i mosques in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere? Well, in case some of my readers have been on Mars for the past few years, the answer is yes, in the thousands.

If, on the other hand, my Muslim brothers and sisters have abandoned God and in fact worship the paper on which the Quran is written, then I fully understand their anger. But I won't be joining them.

In fact, I am now very tempted to fetch whatever copies of the Quran I still have and burn them myself, as an expression of disgust at the rank hypocrisy of Muslims all over the world. For in the time that has passed since the moron Jones's stunt, many hundreds of Muslims have been killed, thousands of Qurans burned and dozens of mosques blown to smithereens as Sunnis and Shi'is from Iraq to Pakistan and beyond set about deliberately slaughtering their Muslim brothers and sisters and desecrating Muslim holy places for no reason other than the fact that the victims were from a different branch of Islam.

Amid the blood and the hot air Muslims would do well to pause and think about what they are doing and what they hope to achieve. Those who can read should spend some time looking back over the past decade to see how many Muslims have been slaughtered by other Muslim bigots and hotheads and compare that with the number of Muslims that have been killed by non-Muslims.

Saudi journalist faces death penalty for tweeting about Prophet Muhammad

A Saudi newspaper columnist, Hamza Kashgari, 23, faces the death penalty after being deported from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia. (See "Malaysia deports Saudi journalist accused of insulting prophet".)

His "crime" was to tweet this on the Prophet Muhammad's birthday:

"I have loved things about you and I have hated things about you and there is a lot I don't understand about you. I will not pray for you."

I can't say that I have loved much about the dear old Prophet either but there's certainly a lot that I detest about him, not least his nine wives and the backward ideology he has bequeathed us Arabs.

Don't get me wrong: I equally detest Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Buddha, Confucius, Marx, Lenin and many other idols of old and new, including Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Vladimir Putin, Dmitriy Medvedev, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping, Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez and Bashar Assad, Binyamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni and Mark Thompson.

But why should anyone be deported or face the death penalty simply for speaking his own mind?

This sad and potentially tragic story serves only to underline the truth in Kashgari's tweet. The Prophet Muhammad's personal flaws aside, he has bequeathed an ideology of intolerance that is inimical to debate and has guaranteed that the critical-thinking faculties of at least a significant minority of Muslims have atrophied, perhaps even physically.

Goodness only knows what evolution will do to the brain of the average Muslim as a consequence of this.

If you believe that Mr Kashgari should be left free to say what he likes as long as he does no harm to others, then please sign this petition and  circulate this blog post far and wide and speak out as loud as possible before it's too late.

Egypt's dishourable cowards

Back in February this year, just one day before the fall of Hosni Mubarak, when many Egyptians were labouring under the illusion that the army was their friend and protector, I said on this blog:

Please, let us all shed our illusions. The Egyptian army is the enemy of the Egyptian people. Some might say this can't be so because the army consists of conscripts, i.e. is made up of the people. That is true, but make no mistake: these conscripts will not hesitate to massacre their own people.

Let us have faith in ourselves. To hell with the army, the police and all the other tools of repression. If the army consisted of real men, then let these men go and fight the real enemy, the enemy whose permission they have to get in order to tread on their own soil in Sinai. Let them go and fight and not surrender in their tens of thousands, as we've seen in 1967 and 1973.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and if there's a silver lining to the mayhem that is now unfolding in Egypt it is that the Egyptian people must by now be shedding all the illusions they have had about their armed forces.

The photograph and video below speak for themselves. The thugs of the Egyptian army – the cowards who dishohoured Egypt not just in 1967 and 1973, but also in 1948 and 1956 – can be seen beating a defenceless, female protester for daring to exercise her inalienable right to protest against the oppression, deception, corruption and privilege of the so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

Predicatably, the SCAF's defenders argue that the incident, which was witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people, never happened and that the image of the woman being beaten had been manipulated. Presumably, they would say the same about the video below, which shows the same woman and a companion being chased then beaten by the brave soldiers.

 

Egypt's armed forces are interested only in protecting their considerable privileges and in enriching themselves. Despite the billions of dollars in US handouts on which they survive and for which they would sell their own mothers, the Egyptian armed forces are not a fighting force in any real, professional sense of the word. Incompetent and incapable of securing a street, let alone fighting another army, they are just one or two levels up on the defunct Gaddafi's thugs. 

Back in 1978 the elite of Egypt's army, Unit 777, was deployed in Malta to free an Egyptian aircraft that had been hijacked. Deluded into thinking that they could imitate the Israeli raid on Entebbe two years earlier, they succeeded only in killing 57 of the 88 hostages, who were reportedly mistaken for the hijackers. 

Thirty-four years have passed since then but, by all accounts, nothing has changed. Egypt's army today is made up of dehumanized, poorly trained, badly educated, semi-literate peasants who are led by corrupt dinasaurs and their cronies, a hierarchy of mediocrities who know little about military strategy and tactics and care less and whose paramount purpose is to preserve their power and privilges.

The revolution that began on 25 January 2011 has only just begun and will not be complete until the dishonourable, incompetent and corrupt traitors in the Egyptian army are purged and brought to account for betraying the people and the country they are supposed to defend.

Is Islam the solution?

How long will it take until the Islamists that are now reaping the rewards of the Arab uprisings which they initially shunned – the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – are exposed for what they are: backward, mentally retarded charlatans, hypocrites and misogynists?

Writing in the Arabist blog, (“Egypt’s Islamists and tourism”) the writer and analyst Issandr El Amrani says:

We are now at a point when the comfortable role of opposition no longer holds for Islamists; it's time to be serious about one's positions and their consequences.

A few years ago, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood MPs in [the Egyptian] parliament opposed a law that would tighten the ban on female genital mutilation (a practice that has absolutely no basis in Islam; it's largely a Nile Valley thing) and also opposed a law banning child beatings. If they are just traditionalists, let them say that. But if they want to invoke religion, they better make their case with full theological and scriptural backing.

Unfortunately, female genital mutilations and child beatings are not the Islamists’ only warts.

According to El Amrani, it would seem that the Islamists also believe that it is possible for tourism in Egypt to flourish without alcohol, with segregated beaches and with the manipulation of Pharaonic statues, such as those depicting fertility gods, to conceal nudity.

He quotes a veiled Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Azza al-Jarf, who told a cheering crowd of supporters at a campaign event dubbed "Let's encourage tourism" on 11 December: “Tourists don't need to drink alcohol when they come to Egypt; they have plenty at home… They come to see the ancient civilization, not to drink alcohol." The crowd chanted: "Tourism will be at its best under Freedom and Justice," the Brotherhood's party and the most influential political group to emerge after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

In addition, prominent Salafi clerics, such as Yasser Bourhami, are advocating restrictions on tourism, the source of livelihood for millions of Egyptians. In an interview with the private Egyptian channel Dream TV, Bourhami described one of his grand ideas for boosting the tourism industry: "A five-star hotel with no alcohol, a beach for women –  sisters –  separated from men in a bay where the two sides can enjoy a holiday for a week without sins."

Another Islamist genius, Tarek Shalaan, who is a prominent member of the Salafi Al-Nur Party, “stumbled through a recent TV interview when asked about his views on the display of nude Pharaonic statues like those depicting fertility gods”, accordng to El Amrani. "The antiquities that we have will be put under a different light to focus on historical events," Shalaan said.

And there’s more.

However, now that they’re “in power”, at least in Tunisia and Egypt, it’s time to question some of the Islamists’ main planks.

One example is the slogan of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, ‑ “Islam is the solution”.  How, exactly will Islam solve Egypt’s economic problems – its grinding poverty and over population? What’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s answer to this, beyond abolishing usury, i.e. introducing “Islamic banking”, which will do absolutely nothing to address the country’s pressing needs?

The answer, alas, is nothing. The Islamists have no economic or foreign or any other policy beyond getting to power and putting women, minorities and others who are not exactly like them in their place. And if you ask yourself how a major party and its variants throughout the Arab world can survive without a policy, the answer is very simple. The answer is common knowledge among Islamists but they are somewhat reluctant to articulate it in public among non-members, for fear of being ridiculed. The Islamists’ answer to all of society’s problems, from unemployment, overpopulation and poor public services to ritual humiliations at the hands of Israel and its ilk, is simply this: if you please God he will solve all your problems. That’s it! You need do nothing further than indulge in activities which, in the Islamists’ eyes, will please God. And he will do the rest. Now you can see why they are shy of articulating this absurd view to the world at large and are comfortable in sharing it only among themselves.

But the big black cloud hovering over all Islamists remains the well-grounded suspicion that they remain anti-democrats and would, when the time is ripe, abolish democracy and institute a theocracy. In my opinion, the suspicion that, in essence, all Islamist parties believe in “One man, one vote, one time” is as true today as it ever was.

According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misri Al-Yawm, only a few days ago a member of Al-Nur Party’s Supreme Committee, Shaaban Darwish, told a party rally in Giza that democracy is heresy because it contradicts the principle of allegiance that was used after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, whereby people choose their caliph once and then remain loyal to him.

One must therefore beware of the Islamists’ pro-democracy "propaganda". As Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya TV, says ("The Islamists: between propaganda and the truth"):

Since the ouster of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, many people … claim that the image of the Islamists has been distorted by the Arabs and the West to prevent them from political participation. Following the revolutions, the Islamist party leaders rushed to improve their image in the eyes of the West, issuing statements stressing that they would not prohibit bikinis from their countries' beaches, or outlaw alcohol, and that they would accept a woman or Christian as leader.

Of course, these speeches are nothing more than public relations, and something that can only be believed by someone ignorant of the region or the logic of religious parties. If the claim of freedom of religion is true, it expresses the opinion of only a few [religious party] leaders, as the majority of leaders and members of such groups consider "purifying" society to be their first duty, and it would not be long before they turned against those political leaders urging tolerance.

Arab society is going through difficult developments that may lead to more dictatorships under the name of democracy, such as what happened in Iran. Therefore, we cannot settle for reading their intentions and believing their propaganda. If these societies … truly want a democratic approach and want to grant an opportunity for all political forces  ‑ including the Islamist and Arab nationalist forces ‑ to participate, they must build a state that is based on a constitution that protects rights, and an army that understands that its duty is not to rule, but to protect democratic institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament, and prevent the democratic system from being overthrown….

In other words, the solution to our countries’ problems is to build democratic, law-governed states that treat all of their citizens as equals, irrespective of gender, colour, ethnicity, faith or no faith.

The solution is not Islam.