Dopo la primavera araba

Authors

  • Massimo Castaldo

Keywords:

Costituzionalismo islamico, Islam politico, Arabia Saudita, Stati Uniti, Unione europea

Abstract

The revolts in the Arab world brought religious organizations on the fore-front. In Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, where free elections were held, the Muslim Brotherhood got the majority of votes. In Egypt its party Freedom and Justice won the relative majority of seats in Parliament, followed by the party al-Nour of the Salafists, a fundamentalist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood is the most popular religious organization, it was established in 1928 with the purpose of opposing Western influence and restore political Islam. This meant a return to the original constitution of Islam based on the principle that the duty of the ruler was to defend and spread the faith and not to make the laws, because they are given by God. Since only a few rules concerning personal and family statutes can be found in the Koran, it was necessary to have recourse to sayings and facts of the Prophet collected by tradition. To select the divine laws from this vast collection, not all genuine, was the work of jurists. Four schools of jurists acquired with time authority, because they where independent from the ruler and because people believed that their members were prophets that could speak in the name of God. This constitutional system was destroyed by the Ottoman Empire when it abandoned in mid XIX century the divine laws, the shari’a, to adopt laws from European countries and it is impossible today to return to the old constitutional system after more than two centuries. How to control that the laws approved by the Parliament are conform to the shari’a? On this question the Egyptian religious parties are divided and the Muslim Brotherhood is divided in its interior. Not only the young people who started the revolution are for a laic State, also the young members and some older leaders of the Brotherhood are against the control of Parliament by religious authority. Therefore, Egypt is today divided between Islamists and secularists with a split that is larger than the election’s results could suggest. The military are another divisive and dangerous problem: how to have them renounce the special status and the power they have enjoyed for seventy years, leave the government to the civilians and return to the barracks. A democratic Egypt is not for the immediate future. The only country that give some hope is Morocco, where the King transformed the Kingdom in a constitutional monarchy with a constitution that protects human rights, freedom of thought and speech and that make legal the language of the Berbers. The Muslim Brotherhood declared to follow the democratic line of the Turkish Akp, and it can control extremism thanks to the authority of the King who is also religious leader. The United States is trying to overcome some hostility to establish relations with the new Egyptian parties. The European Union is paralyzed by the euro crisis.

Downloads

Published

20-04-2022

How to Cite

Castaldo, M. (2022). Dopo la primavera araba. Rivista Di Studi Politici Internazionali, 79(1), 35–47. Retrieved from https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa00/index.php/studi_politici_internazionali/article/view/16954

Issue

Section

Articoli