Cairo's Tahrir Square fills with anti-Morsi protesters

Tens of thousands of protesters opposed to Egypt's president and the sweeping new powers he assumed last week are in Cairo's Tahrir Square, hours after a new constitution was hastily approved.

The Islamist-dominated constituent assembly finished voting on the draft in the early hours on Friday.

The draft will now be sent to Mr Morsi, who is expected to call a referendum.

The Supreme Constitutional Court is due to rule on Sunday on whether the assembly should be dissolved.

Senior judges have been in a stand-off with the president since he granted himself sweeping new powers.'Fall of the regime'

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An emergency decree issued last week said Mr Morsi's decisions could not be revoked by any authority, including the judiciary, until the new constitution had been ratified and a fresh parliamentary election is held.

It also stated that the courts could not dissolve the constituent assembly.

Mr Morsi says he will give up his extraordinary powers once the new constitution is approved by a referendum.

Live TV feeds from Tahrir Square showed tens of thousands of people in the square.

Demonstrators chanted slogans, including, "The people want the fall of the regime", one of the rallying cries against ex-President Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled last year.

In the city of Alexandria, supporters and opponents of Mr Morsi clashed on the streets, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties have called on their supporters to join a rally in Cairo on Saturday.

Protesters confronted Mr Morsi at Friday prayers at the al-Sharbatli mosque after the preacher defended the president's recent actions, comparing them with incidents in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.

The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Cairo, says that infuriated worshippers, who chanted against the president, while Mr Morsi himself got up to say that did not agree with the preacher.

It is an illustration of how inflamed and divided opinion is across Egypt, our correspondent says.'Divisive move'

Mr Morsi insists the powers he has taken are meant to be temporary and will protect the transition to a constitutional democracy.

However, their extent has raised fears that he might become a new strongman.

UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay has written to Mr Morsi, asking him to reconsider his decree. In her letter, Ms Pillay "warned that approving a constitution in these circumstances could be a deeply divisive move", her spokesman said.

Mr Morsi's decree of 22 November gave the 100-member constituent assembly until January to complete the draft constitution.

Opponents filed 43 separate lawsuits challenging the process.

When the Supreme Constitutional Court said it would soon rule on the lawsuits, supporters of the president on the assembly decided to pass a rushed draft to head off the threat of dissolution.

During a marathon session that began on Thursday and continued through the night, the assembly voted on and passed all 234 articles.

Among the historic changes to Egypt's system of government, the draft limits the amount of time a president can serve to two four-year terms.

It also introduces some civilian oversight of the military establishment.

The draft keeps in place an article defining "principles of Sharia", or Islamic law, as the main source of legislation.

Don't blame Muslim Brotherhood for Morsy power grab

 Twenty years ago, Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. diplomat, famously worried that Islamists would exploit democratic elections to come to power, after which they would pull the democratic ladder up behind them. Instead of one man, one vote, he said, Islamists wanted one man, one vote, one time.

Last week, Egypt's President Mohamed Morsy, a member of theMuslim Brotherhood, and his country's first democratically elected president, seemed to fulfill Djerejian's grim prophecy.

In a series of unilateral amendments to Egypt's interim constitution, Morsy declared that his word "is final and binding and cannot be appealed by any way or to any entity," and that he is empowered to "take the necessary actions and measures to protect the country and the goals of the revolution."

But, as shocking as Morsy's actions are, they do not prove that Islamists cannot be democrats. Morsy's decision to grant himself unquestioned authority was not the final, spectacularly public phase in some hitherto clandestine Muslim Brotherhood plan to erect a holy autocracy. Instead, the Egyptian president simply did what Egyptian presidents have been doing for more than 60 years — that is, loosening institutional restraints on their authority in order to more easily fulfill their agendas.

News: Is Morsy Egypt's next strongman?

That Morsy is an Islamist is largely irrelevant. It's likely that the autocratic temptation would have seized Egypt's president regardless of his party or ideological orientation. This is not only because Egypt has had a distressingly long history of powerful executives, it's also because, at this moment in Egypt's political history, there is no actor, institution or organization able to keep the presidency in check.

Under such circumstances, even the most earnest democrats would find themselves flirting with authoritarianism — first in the name of the greater good, and then later, when pretenses can be dropped, in the service of naked ambition.

Usually, presidential ambitions are tamed by legislatures, and this was to be the case under Egypt's interim constitution. A parliament was elected in January, but the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved the body once it became clear that Morsy was on his way to being elected president.

 

  

The ostensible reason for the dissolution was that the parliamentary election law ran afoul of some foggy constitutional provision, but the real reason was that Islamists dominated parliament, and the court feared that this Islamist legislature, coupled with a Muslim Brotherhood president, would lead Egypt irretrievably down the road to theocracy.

In the absence of an elected legislature, it was left to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces -- the consortium of generals who ruled Egypt for the 18 months following former leader Hosni Mubarak's overthrow -- to counteract the presidency. But the Egyptian people and the generals had grown weary of each other. Word in Cairo was that the septuagenarian minister of defense, Muhammad Hussein Tantawi, wanted a way out, a "safe exit" in which he could live out his days free of the indignities visited upon his old boss, who bounced between prison and infirmary.

A bargain was worked out. The president clawed back the council's powers and sent the minister of defense and the armed forces chief of staff into cossetted retirement (while naming them presidential advisers). The political landscape now lay prostrate before him.

Except for the judiciary, and particularly the SCC. To Morsy, the 17 men (and one woman) who make up that body constitute a defiant remnant of the Mubarak order. That a clash was inevitable was apparent from Morsy's first moments in office, when his inauguration was delayed for several hours over his reluctance to be sworn in before the outgoing head of the court.

Business: Morsy makes his power plays

When the president decreed that the dissolved parliament should return to work, the judges shut him down. Later, he tried to fire Egypt's attorney general, a Mubarak appointee. Again, he was told that this was outside his ken. Rumors swirled that the SCC was planning to dissolve the second constituent assembly; others reported that a court was about to rule the Muslim Brotherhood itself illegal.

Morsy and his men point to these things and argue that he was forced to take action. But what's remarkable is what the president didn't do. For all of his complaining about SCC's dissolution of parliament's lower house, and for all the damage that the decision did to Egypt's democratic transition, the president has indicated that he will uphold it.

Essam el-Erian, deputy chairman of the Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, has publicly called on Morsy to reinstate the parliament, but a presidential spokesman has said that there are no plans to do so.

The president's reluctance to bring back the parliament further reinforces the impression that his main aim is to expand the powers of his office, which he probably believes is better able to put Egypt right than a raucous legislature packed with unreliable Salafists and a fractious "liberal" wing.

Though the Muslim Brotherhood has generally fallen into line behind the president, there are signs that at least some of its members are deeply uncomfortable with what he has wrought. Muslim Brotherhood politician Ahmed Fahmi, the speaker of the upper house of parliament and a relative of Morsy's, was reported to have said, "We wish that the president had conducted a popular referendum on the constitutional declaration, because what he has done has divided the country between the secular and Islamic forces." (Fahmi has since denied making the statement.)

Muhammad Abd al-Quddus, a Muslim Brotherhood member and a member of the board of Egypt's journalists union, reportedly said, "despite my membership in the Brotherhood, I am a son of the revolution for freedom. Therefore, I reject unlimited powers for the president, regardless of the reasons and the duration."

Even some of the president's defenders have betrayed hints of ambivalence over his radical decision. Muhammad al-Biltagi, secretary general of the Freedom and Justice Party's Cairo branch, declared that "many have a right to be worried" about the president's move to place his decisions above oversight, and he called for a national dialogue to arrive at a solution that would preserve "the right of the president to perform his duties with full authority without political interference from Mubarak's Constitutional Court, as well as the right of the political and social forces to receive guarantees against even temporary presidential tyranny."

Today, the only check on Morsy's authority comes from the streets. And while the protests against the president's decisions have been surprisingly robust, Morsy has so far resisted making concessions. In a meeting with Egyptian judges, he reassured them that he would limit his use of his new powers, but, as of this writing, his decree still stands.

Though large protests are scheduled, the president may believe that he can afford to wait them out. After all, a repeat of the January 25 scenario is unlikely.

The opposition to the president, though significant, remains fractured and uncoordinated, and in any case is far narrower than it was in 2011. The military, which proved essential in removing Mubarak from power, has no appetite for a repeat engagement with the responsibilities of governance, and Morsy has more legitimacy — at home and abroad — than Mubarak did.

And Morsy may believe that the great, silent majority of Egyptians are behind him. After all, Egypt's GDP is about an eighth of the United States', and a greater percentage of Americans were literate during the Civil War than Egyptians are today. The vast countryside is likely untroubled by the president's constitutional maneuverings.

One might be tempted to ask what the United States, Egypt's greatest foreign patron, can do to set that country on the right course. Some have suggested withholding aid, canceling loans and other means of pressuring Morsy to step back from the authoritarian ledge on which he now finds himself.

These measures may produce flurries of positive statements and signals in the near term, but they won't change the fundamental alchemy of Egyptian politics. One only need examine the example of Iraq, which, after almost a decade of American tutelage has nonetheless glided into a form of dominant party autocracy, to realize that genuinely democratic governance cannot be imposed, especially on poor, underdeveloped countries.

None of this — Egypt's tradition of executive dominance, its feeble institutions, its weak political organizations or its enervated society — is particularly the fault of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In fact, if we are to take any lesson from the turmoil on the banks of the Nile, it is not that Islamists can't be trusted with Egypt's presidency, it is that no one can. Morsy may yet reverse course, but odds are that this will not be the last time that an Egyptian leader tries to convince his people that he must kill democracy in order to save it.

Egypt crisis: Mass rally held against Mohammed Mursi

 

Tens of thousands of people have held protests in Cairo against Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi, who last week granted himself sweeping new powers.

Flag-waving demonstrators chanted slogans accusing the president and the Muslim Brotherhood of betraying last year's revolution.

On Monday Mr Mursi sought to defuse the crisis by saying the decree granting him new powers was limited in scope.

However, his opponents want him to withdraw the measure completely.

Ahead of Tuesday's rally, opposition activists clashed with police protecting the nearby US embassy. A protester, who was in his fifties, died of a heart attack after inhaling tear gas.

Activists later converged on Tahrir Square - the main focus of the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak - for one of the largest demonstrations to date against Mr Mursi.

Many lawyers joined the protest

"The people want to bring down the regime," marchers chanted, echoing slogans used in last year's protests.

"We don't want a dictatorship again. The Mubarak regime was a dictatorship. We had a revolution to have justice and freedom," protester Ahmed Husseini was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

Journalists, lawyers and opposition figures - including Nobel Peace prize laureate Mohammed ElBaradei, joined Tuesday's rally,

"The main demand is to withdraw the constitutional declaration," said Amr Moussa, a former Arab League chief who has joined the opposition.

Protests were also held in Alexandria and other cities.