With a 75 percent majority, we had a true Islamic parliament: 49 percent of the vote went to the Muslim Brotherhood and 26 percent went to the Al Nour party of the Salafis. But, as far as the parliament went, they were united. The Islamic channels were elated to talk about this monumental victory for Islam.
On the first day of the parliament there is usually a tradition of standing up for the national anthem. Many Salafis members did not stand. And no, they did not stand to follow in the footsteps of Colin Kaepernick or Black Lives Matter or for the well-being of the oppressed and the abused. Their party leader put it this way: “It is an abomination. We only stand for Allah. The national anthem is a Western tradition. We should not abide by it.” A couple of years later this leader would be seen standing alongside the military as the national anthem played. He would also sit, fetch, and roll over whenever the military asked him to do so.
There is another tradition in which every parliament member stands up and swears to protect the law and the constitution. It goes like this: “I swear to protect, blah-blah, and maintain, blah-blah-blah, the law, blah, country, blah, and the constitution.”
But for the first time in history we heard it with some additional malarkey. Each Islamic member stood up, recited the pledge as is, and then added “to maintain and protect and obey the constitution in a way that does not contradict with the Sharia of Allah.”
This made many people furious. It wasn’t that they tampered with the pledge, it was the fact that they showed their intention to interpret the law of the land through the lens of Sharia, and that religion would trump everything else.
For my show, though, this was the joke that kept on giving. We would all jokingly swear to not drink alcohol, commit adultery, steal, or cheat “in a way that doesn’t contradict with the Sharia of Allah.” As long as you said those magic words, all bad behavior could be absolved. Underneath the jokes and smart punch lines, however, many people in my circle were scared.
We are an interesting society. We might be religious, but we are also class conscious, and the “classy” educated circles were basically reacting to the parliament sessions like the Armageddon apocalypse.
I used to go to a nice sports club called Gezira Club, one of those hard-to-get-in country clubs. This is where you will find people from the upper class of society and an abundance of high-class “has-beens” that might have lost their wealth but not their arrogance. An integral part of their character was the cynicism and the innate hate they had for the younger generation for the simple fact that the young presumably had more time left to live on earth. The most interesting members were the old women whose faces stopped giving a fuck and just faltered under the years of plastic surgery.
These people at the club gathered to watch the parliament sessions with utmost disgust. They despised the fact that those fanatic zealots who came from rural areas and had absolutely no credentials other than a beard and backward dogmatic ideology were now the face of the first elected parliament. A lot of these older people blamed the younger people for the revolution, and, subsequently, the new government that came with it. This is the result of your revolution, they would shout in our faces.
In the first week of parliamentary sessions, a well-known Islamic fanatic stood up in the middle of the session and started to recite the call to prayer. The president of the parliament was from the Muslim Brotherhood and scolded the man.
“How could you prevent me from calling for holy prayer?” the man asked the president. “Aren’t you a Muslim?”
“I am more Muslim than you are, but this is not the time or the place,” the head of parliament answered.
No one would remember anything from that session other than that argument between a right-wing Islamist and an even further right-wing Islamist, so I dedicated a big chunk of my show to it. I wanted to show people that there is not just one version of Islam. And if Muslim Brotherhood leadership was not religious enough by Salafi standards, then what would that make the rest of us?
The parliament sessions were long and boring, but we were the only ones who had a dedicated team to record and report on everything happening there. We were like the Egyptian version of C-Span.
There were only a handful of liberal representatives in the middle of this parliamentary madness. Every time one of them spoke he was heckled and interrupted like a bad standup comedian performing for a tough crowd. There were no real discussions; the Islamists were driven like herds to the sessions to approve what was already pre-dictated by their leaders. It seemed a tight pact until the scandals started flooding in.