by Bob Seery

Created on: February 06, 2011

The Egyptian people have risen at last to claim their freedoms. After thirty years of rigged elections, rampant corruption, arbitrary arrests and more recently, food riots and labour unrest. Hundreds of thousands of protestors have flocked daily to Tahrir Square in Cairo to demand of their government only one thing, that President Mubarak should "Go".  At Friday's sermon on the so-called "Day of Departure", the imam enjoined the crowd and the world's gathering press that this was not a religious or ideological revolution but simply a call for regime change. The response from Washington has been one of shock, Mubarak has been a close regional ally and a heavy recipient of US foreign aid but such has been the clamour for change even the White House has been forced into a volte face, echoing calls by EU leaders that an orderly transition towards a new democratically elected government must begin 'as soon as possible'.

The world's media have been generally sympathetic towards the demands of the Egyptian people but a significant proportion of commentators have  instead taken the opportunity to point to the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and see not a burgeoning democracy but the makings of a Sunni religious state. This, however, is both absurd scaremongering and cynical stage management; while mischaracterising the nature of religious belief within Egypt it also drains international support from the revolution. This type of misrepresentation is in fact also the counter-revolutionary gambit of an increasingly desperate regime who for the first time on state television on Friday, after six days of protests shown worldwide, acknowledged that there were even demonstrations in the country and it did so by blaming the unrest on the Muslim Brotherhood.

But I think we have to distinguish here between the several gradations of 'being Islamic' in Egypt. If we can point to an imaginary spectrum whose bottom end is; "adhering to all the principles of the Koran as evinced by those of the Wahhabi faith" (commonly regarded as the most fundamentalist version of Islam) and move our way through the intermediary stages whose top end is unadulterated secularism, that is to say a political position which is in no way, shape or form influenced by any religious tenets, then we will find an agreeable middle bulge of the populace who retain a faith, practise it daily like all Muslims,

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