Bishop Paula and Nour Party rep Younis Makhioun
The Muslim Brotherhood is down but by no means out, and meanwhile, the Salafis are still pushing for Sharia in Egypt. The Copts will have none of it, as they know that that means their subjugation as dhimmis and institutionalized discrimination and harassment.
“Islamists, Coptic Church exchange threats over Egypt’s new constitution,” by Gamal Essam El-Din for Ahram Online, November 24:
The 50-member committee entrusted with amending Egypt’s suspended 2012 constitution is struggling to reach consensus over the charter’s preamble and 17 other controversial articles.
Bishop Paula, the committee’s Coptic Church representative, threatened to withdraw from the committee for a second time in protest of the constitution’s preamble, which currently reflects a large input from the ultraconservative Salafist Nour party. The committee’s representatives from the Catholic and Anglican churches have also threatened to withdraw over the preamble.
Paula told parliamentary correspondents on Monday that “representatives of Egypt’s churches withdrew from the 2012 constituent assembly [which first drafted the suspended constitution] after Islamists insisted on drafting a new article that would define the principles of Islamic sharia. It seems that we will have to withdraw again, because the revised constitution’s preamble offers a definition of Islamic sharia as per the Nour Party’s demand.”
Paula also charged that committee members decided to remove the word “civilian” from the preamble’s description of the Egyptian state at the request of the Nour Party.
The current preamble in circulation amoung [sic] committee members now states “we are writing a new constitution that will establish a modern and democratic state in Egypt, and it is a constitution which stresses that the principles of Islamic sharia are the major source of Egypt’s legislation.”
Representatives from the Nour Party and Egypt’s leading Sunni institution Al-Azhar have threatened to withdraw if the word “civilian” is included, because they argue that it reflects secular and western values….