The Egyptian constitution was passed on the 25th of December 2012, concluding a process during which the idea of Islam has towered over the public debate. Inasmuch as the Islamic constitutional stake was mainly symbolic, this predominance is the result of constitutional debates being an expression platform in public space for political actors and that in Egypt Islam appears to represent a strong and effective rallying point.

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Egyptian public space is teeming, chaotic and wild. It is confusing for the observer, who has difficulty distinguishing between information, trivia, and lie [1]. Nevertheless, optimists may argue that its vitality shows the path of democratic transition. Indeed, in radio and TV programmes as on the streets, the constitutional issue has been discussed intensively and tirelessly.

Often, Islam has been at the centre of the debate and served as a base on which actors have articulated their opinions. It was to demand the application of Sharia [2] that tens of thousands of Salafis gathered in Tahrir Square on 9 November 2012. During the referendum campaign, conferences of the Nour Party, the first political force of this movement, were entitled the Sharia and the Constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood has continuously proclaimed that the Constitution would introduce a "civil state" without opposing the Islamic cultural identity of the country. Finally, the over-representation of members with Islamist affiliations in the Constituent Assembly has been the argument that justified the series of withdrawals by secular actors from the constitutional process.

Despite its centrality, Islam has been a largely symbolic stake, insofar as it did not bear direct concrete implications. Consensus was achieved fairly quickly on Islamic articles. Article 3 assigns to el-Azhar, an influential and respected theological institution in the Muslim space, a role in the interpretation of Sharia. However, its opinions are advisory and non-binding. With regard to article 2 establishing the principles of Sharia as the main source of law, this was already the case in the constitution of 1971 after an amendment of 1980 [3] .

Annexation to this provision of article 219, defining the expression "principles of Sharia", is an interesting novelty, since it tends to fix the notion with a religious vocabulary [4]. For its instigators, it is intended to amend the philosophical interpretation of article 2 by the Supreme Constitutional Court with the aim of bringing Egyptian law closer to Islamic texts. Indeed, in its jurisprudence, the Court distinguishes between absolute principles of Sharia and non-absolute principles of Sharia. The latter refer to characterized Islamic norms. The Court considers these principles as varying according to time and place, therefore it grants the Parliament the freedom to interpret and adapt them to society's needs. On the contrary, absolute principles bind the legislator. However, the imposed constraint is slight, since the Court tends to understand them as general principles expressing the purposes of the Islamic normative system [5] rather than as a catalogue of explicit rules.

It should be acknowledged that the extension of religious terminology in the constitutional field is likely to push judges and lawmakers to substantiate textually the reference to Islam in their work. It is thus likely that the Supreme Constitutional Court tilts its teleological interpretation of the absolute principles of Sharia towards the Islamic corpus. However, it should allow legislators substantial room for maneuver. Indeed, the Islamic normative repertoire is neither consistent nor complete and replete with gaps where reflections of the Supreme Constitutional Court and Parliament will be able to fit. As mentioned in article 219, there is a rich Islamic jurisprudential tradition which fits in what is now categorized as "the Sunni doctrines" [6] each with their perspectives and norms concerning their nature, content and techniques of interpretation.

If legal implications do not explain adequately the domination of Islam in the public debate on the constitution, let us take a look at Egyptian society. The academic field agrees to observe that since the beginning of the 1970s, Arab societies are experiencing a process of “Islamization”. Islam is assumed to have replaced Arab nationalism as the social cement, since the debacle of the Six Day War [7] . Indeed, the majority of Egyptians appear to be pious and to give religion a central place in everyday life. This religious commitment is expressed through various social practices such as the wearing of the veil, or the enrollment of children in evening classes at Quran schools. In this context, it appears that islamizing the constitutional issue has enabled political actors to render intelligible the debate for the majority of the people by connecting it to their daily practices . It has transformed a complex political equation in a simple dichotomous question: for or against Islam in the political sphere?

It is all the more plausible since Egyptian political culture does not clearly accredit traditional democratic institutions, classically the major theme of a constitutional debate. From the colonial period to the reign of Mubarak, parliaments and governments have existed. However, real power was always located in other dimensions: those of the British administration, the inner circle of the despot, or the Ministry of the Interior [8] . Therefore, it seems difficult to grip the population with discourse on the powers of administrative regulation authorities, the President of the Republic's right of dissolution or the balance between the lower and upper houses of Parliament.

Islam therefore seems to represent a preferred channel for political entrepreneurs to join a people that has become a potential clientele since the opening of the political market provoked by the fall of Mubarak. In the theatre of Egyptian politics, Islam is the light revealing the identity of the characters to the public. The credits feature the authentic and upright Salafists, the reasonable seculars able to distinguish between the political and religious spheres, and the Muslim Brotherhood hybrid of the previous two, undergoing metamorphoses according to the act, the decor and the audience. The mise en scène of the constitutional play was carried out by the media, which used Islam as a dramatic resource. Indeed, the fabrication of an existential social challenge was likely to sell copies. The sides understood it as the transformation of Egypt into an Iranian-style theocracy or the dismemberment of its Islamic character.

Neither of these options is plausible, it rather seems that the country will follow a path that is singular as well as gradual . If the Constitution will frame and accompany the Egyptian future, this depends on a complex combination of social, economic, political and legal factors. Indeed, a Constitution does not impose itself on a society but exchanges with it in a mutually constitutive relationship between socio-political and legal practices.

To return to the constitutional debate in the public sphere, it had the merit of problematizing another broadly held belief around the region: Egyptians create the best theatrical cinema of the Arab world.

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[1] During the referendum campaign fake Constitutions have been handed out. Supporters of the “no” also argued that the Constitution granted the President the right to alienate the territory of the country or change the civil status of individuals.

[2] Currently presented, particularly by Salafis, as an original term in Islam to mean Muslim law, this use of Sharia (way) appears in the 19th and 20th centuries. It replaces the concept of fiqh, which refers to the jurisprudential corpus stemming from the interpretation by Ulemas of the Sunnah and the Quran . Initially, the concept of Sharia was used to indicate these two sources and not the normative set as a whole. For an introduction to Muslim normative terminologies and their history, see Josef Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, Oxford 1964; Noel J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law, Edinburgh 1964; Baber Johansen, in Contingency a Sacred Law. Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh, Leiden 1999. Baudouin Dupret and Leon Buskens, The Invention of Muslim law in after Orientalism. Paris, Karthala 2011.

[3] Before the principles of Sharia law were simply regarded as a primary source of law.

[4] The principles of Islamic Sharia include general evidence, foundational rules, rules of jurisprudence, and credible sources accepted in Sunni doctrines and by the larger community. For an English translation of the Constitution: http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/egypt-s-draft-constitution-translated .

[5] See judgement Supreme Court Constitutional Court 03/05/1997 "religion, body, reason, honor and property protection". For developments on the interpretation of article 2 by the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court see: Bernard-Maugiron N. - « La place de la charia dans la hiérarchie des normes », in B. Dupret (ed.),  La charia aujourd'hui. Usages de la référence au droit islamique , La découverte, 2012, p. 51-64. Bernard-Maugiron N. et Dupret B. -  Le Prince et son juge. Droit et politique dans l'Egypte contemporaine ,  Egypte-Monde arabe, n° 2, 1999.

[6] Schools: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali.

[7] See e.g., Fouad Ajami, "The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967", Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[8] See for example, Nathan Brown, 'Constitutions in a Nonconstitutionnal World, Chapter 1 and 3.

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