Political situation in Egypt is of concern not just for Egypt but whole Middle East and rest of the Muslim countries also. Most of the liberals in Western media argue that it is turning point for Political Islam and exposes the weaknesses and inability of the Political Islam to govern-and was a good thing what happened it Egypt. Others argue that Army intervention further strengthens the Islamists, who will argue that Democracy, Liberals and West cannot be trusted-they accept the results only if liberals win as is evident in Egypt, in Ageria in 1969 and Hamas’s victory in Gaza. Unfortunately Turkey could be next.The West and Liberals do everything in their power to undermine democratically elected Islamists-a self-defeating proposition. Saudi Arabia and UAE just announced total aid of about  six billion dollars to Egypt. They did not offer aid while Morsi was president.These regimes do not like Democracy for their own survival. Miss  Sara Carr, an Egyptian blogger, writes wisely;” The Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high.”    ( F. Sheikh )

Other excerpts from her column;

Before I begin, let me state some facts, so that when people begin the ad hominem attacks they can try to rein them in within the following boundaries:

I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep Ahmed Shafiq out).

I am one of the administrators of a blog called “MB in English” that features English translations of awful statements of a sectarian, conspiratorial or bonkers nature that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) intends for domestic consumption only.

I am against army intervention in politics.

I state all this because Egyptian politics and society in general are currently split along identity lines in a way that they have never been over the last three years. This problem is so chronic that the merits or flaws of an argument are almost entirely determined by who is making the argument, considered through a haze of fury and suspicion.

For the past week, I have been trundling between the pro- and anti-Morsi protests. It is like traveling between two planets. The pro-camp has significantly more men than woman — although there are women and children there — and it lacks the social diversity of the anti-camp. I have never seen one unveiled woman who is not a journalist there. I have never met a Christian or encountered any other journalist who has met one there (it is important to note that pro-Morsi protesters and pro-Morsi media have often claimed that there are Christians attending their sit-in). At the same time, they also allege that the church was behind the former Mubarak regime-US-Zionist plot to oust Morsi.

The point is that the pro-Morsi crowd is largely homogenous. Their opponents use this homogeneity as evidence that the MB is, at best, an organization that has failed to market itself to non-supporters; and, at worst, a closed group unconcerned with non-members.

While the MB’s opposition might be correct in this assertion, many go one step further. They suggest that Morsi supporters are all members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and all unthinking androids programmed by the Supreme Guide. The popular derogatory term for them is khirfan (sheep). The aim here is to dehumanize and deny agency, much in the same way the Muslim Brotherhood dismiss their opponents as kuffar (infidels) or feloul (Mubarak regime beneficiaries or loyalists).Click Link to read full article;

http://www.madamasr.com/content/sheep-and-infidels

KHALED M. ABOU EL FADL is a Professor of Law at UCLA and Modern Islamic scholar. He writes in NYT article:

“This time, the military agreed with the protesters. But next time, when protesters call for something that isn’t in the army’s interest, they will meet a very different fate. Today they are called “the people”; tomorrow they will be labeled seditious saboteurs. A year from now, the dreamy youth who celebrated and danced when Mr. Morsi was overthrown may well find themselves in the cell next door to the Brotherhood.”

“No country did more to undermine Mr. Morsi’s government and celebrate its fall than Saudi Arabia. The Saudis understand that the threat that the Egyptian democratic experiment once posed to Saudi autocracy is gone.”

“Democracy is not founded upon the principle of safeguarding the rights of the popular, but upon safeguarding the rights of the most unpopular. What so many Egyptians are forgetting is that the same “public interest” that justified the overthrow and persecution of one political party today will tomorrow justify the repression of anyone who questions the power of Egypt’s army and judiciary.”

“However, while spouting this lofty rhetoric, the army has completely flouted the basic principles of the rule of law. It has arrested members of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Mr. Morsi’s political party for sedition and advocating violence, but conveniently failed to arrest any of the people responsible for burning Brotherhood offices or gunning down Mr. Morsi’s supporters.

Many so-called liberals are praising the military for upholding personal freedoms while blissfully ignoring the fact that one of the army’s first acts was to close down all media that the military, in its infinite wisdom, deemed a danger to public order. This includesAl Jazeera, which saw its office in Cairo shut and its workers threatened and arrested, and their equipment confiscated.

This is nothing new. The army has simply reaffirmed and aggravated a decades-old feud between secularists (who believe that they alone understand democracy) and Islamists (who believe that secularists only believe in democracy when it serves to exclude and marginalize Islamists). Mr. Morsi’s fatal mistake was to believe he could win the trust and loyalty of his defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. Instead, he got a coup.

Secularists across the Middle East have traditionally failed at the ballot box because they lacked support among the pious masses and instead had to rely on the repressive might of the military. Islamists have generally fared well in elections, but because of emotional appeal rather than competence in governing. So secularists have ended up monopolizing power by excluding and repressing Islamists. The predictable result has been radicalization of the Islamists, after they lose trust in the hallowed principles of democracy and human rights”. click link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/opinion/the-perils-of-a-peoples-coup.html?ref=opinion

Posted By F. Sheikh

Bharatiya Janata Party has chosen Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujrat as their official candidate for Prime Minister in the upcoming elections. It is interesting book review to read about Narendra Modi, a controversial figure in Indian politics.( F. Sheikh)

Some excerpts;

The physician sat in the corner of his office in Ahmedabad, a map of India’s western state of Gujarat on one side, a map of the human nervous system on the other, his hip leaning against the drawer that I spent weeks trying to convince him to open.

After agreeing to a list of conditions—I could not take any photographs, I could not remove anything from his office—he agreed to show me the drawer’s contents. It was a six-inch stack of letters between two longtime pen pals, the physician and a young man named Narendra Modi, the current chief minister of Gujarat and the official candidate from the Bharatiya Janata Party to contest next year’s elections for India’s prime minister. I took out my digital recorder and began reading each letter aloud. A few days before I boarded my return flight to California, the physician called me to his office.

“Zahir bhai,” he said. It was unusual for him to address me this way—he is in his 60s, twice my age, and “bhai” means brother in Hindi and is used most often with someone older.

“Zahir bhai,” he repeated. “I am very sorry. You cannot use my name in your piece.”

I was not surprised; very few in Gujarat are willing to use their real name when asked about Modi. I told him I would be happy to change his name.

“No, you cannot use my name or my letters or my story. I have three children. Modi will ruin their lives if people know my views on him.”

I pleaded with him to reconsider but he would not budge.

“You do not have children. You do not know what it is like to live in Gujarat. You will return to America eventually. Please, you must understand.”

Unfortunately, I do understand.”

“Narendra Damodardas Modi was born on September 17, 1950 in Vadnagar, then a part of the Bombay state that later split into two, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Modi’s father was a tea vendor, his mother a homemaker, and Modi spent much of his childhood working alongside his father. But it was not a happy childhood, he tells Mukhopadhyay: “I had a lot of pain because I grew up in a village where there was no electricity and in my childhood we used to face a lot of hardships because of this.”

Modi showed a fondness for the Hindu right wing group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a child. The RSS was started in 1925 as a Hindu nationalist movement and reached infamy in 1948 when one of its members, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi. It was declared a terrorist group immediately after by the Indian government and banned for two years. But today it remains as strong—and hardline—as ever.

There are an estimated 40,000 RSS camps, or shakhas, across the country where Hindu men and young boys gather each morning to chant slogans and perform a series of exercises, often using a long stick. In the landmark report on the 2002 Gujarat riots, “We Have No Orders to Save You,” Human Rights Watch said it was the RSS that was responsible for passing out lists of Muslim-owned business and homes to mobs at the start of the violence.” Click Link to Read Full article;

http://www.bostonreview.net/world/zahir-janmohamed-narendra-modi-india-gujarat-man-who-refuses-wear-green?utm_source=Newsletter+July+2%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Newsletter+July+2&utm_medium=email

Both Islamists and liberals are the losers and both played their part in this sad saga. After getting elected as President, Mr. Morsi acted as a dictator, violated minority rights, unilaterally imposed Muslim Brotherhood agenda and broke every democratic norm. He was incompetent and short-sighted.

The opposition mainly composed of liberals and secularists never accepted the free democratic election results and used all the energies to undermine the democratic process. They asked for military intervention and forgot that all the previous dictators came from military. They had no patience to wait for the next elections and they were as short-sighted as Islamists.

Samer Shehata, Associate professor of International Studies at University Of Oklahoma writes:

“  Fair elections have improved the Brotherhood’s campaign skills. But it hasn’t fully committed to pluralism or to equal rights for minorities. It participates in democracy, but doesn’t want to share power.

Many in the opposition, on the other hand, believe fiercely in minority rights, personal freedoms, civil liberties and electoral coalition-building — as long as the elections keep Islamists out of power. In other words, they are liberal without being democrats; they are clamoring fervently for Mr. Morsi’s ouster and want the military to intervene. But they have proved themselves woefully unequipped to organize voters. Though my heart is with their democratic goals, I must admit that their commitment to democratic principles runs skin deep.”

I agree with Wequar Sahib’s comments in on the meetings that religion and state affairs should not mix. But the fact is that in Muslim countries Islamists just cannot be wished away. They only can be defeated in democratic process and they thrive in chaos. Islamists win elections because they are more organized and committed. The answer by the liberals and secularist should be to organize and convince the public that they can manage and run the country and will not undermine the personal freedoms of religion. Undermining the democratic process is self-defeating. In Pakistan , despite the religious extremism, the moderate political parties, Muslim League-N and PPP, are very organized and always beat Islamists in fair elections.

Samer Shehata writes in the same article;

“Still, integrating Islamists is essential if Egypt is to have stable, democratic politics. Movements like the Brotherhood are a core constituency in Egyptian society; democracy requires their inclusion. If the millions in the streets want the Brotherhood out of power, they must learn to organize and campaign effectively, and vote them out.

That would be the best way to establish liberal democracy in Egypt. Removing Mr. Morsi through a military coup supported by the secular and liberal opposition could well be the worst.”

F.Sheikh