In Egypt today many people refuse to accept the result of the recent elections. The army has stepped in, ostensibly to maintain order, but in fact to impose the kind of disorder with which armies are equipped to deal - the disorder of the battlefield. Just why this has happened is a topic to which I will return next week. But we should not assume that the Egyptian people are any different from the rest of us when it comes to the hard discipline of being governed by people you dislike.
I know from my own experience just how hard this discipline can be. My father was a staunch Labour supporter. He believed that Tory politicians were all corrupt representatives of an oppressive ruling class, and that the entire English establishment - the Church of England, the House of Lords, the Monarchy, the "squire-archy", the old universities, the industrialists and financiers, you name it - was a system of exploitation, erected to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
I think that was a common view among Labour supporters in those days, and the Labour Party itself did not take a great deal of trouble to refute it.
As a result my father actually hated the Tory Party and all those who sat in Parliament as members of it. We could do nothing to pacify his rage when the Tory party made the mistake of winning an election, or when a Tory government passed some law that seemed to him to damage the interests of the trade unions or the working class. For several days in the wake of such events he would be unapproachable. But he accepted the result, accepted its legitimacy, accepted that he had no recourse other than to campaign for the repeal of the laws that offended him.
I experienced a version of my father's habitual rage when the government of Tony Blair decided, in the face of massive opposition from ordinary people living in the countryside, to ban our traditional forms of hunting.
This seemed to me to be a new kind of legislation, aimed at a minority and fired by sentiments that ought to have no place in parliament. It affected me since hunting is part of my life, and the life of my rural neighbours. But I had to swallow my disappointment, and to acknowledge that the law is legitimate. I can campaign for a repeal, but I am duty bound as a citizen to obey it. Accepting it is one part of the burden that I and other Tories have suffered under 13 years of Labour government - the burden of being ruled by people we disagree with, some of whom we actively dislike.
I think people are not as aware as they should be of how contrary to human nature it is, to accept orders from those with whom you do not agree. Many have seen the events of the Arab Spring as involving a popular movement for democracy against autocratic government, and to some extent this is true. But one thing that has been very noticeable, especially in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, has been the emergence of democratically elected governments that have no time for opinions other than their own.
In Western democracies our governments are aware that many people, perhaps even a majority, did not vote for them, and that they must therefore make themselves acceptable to their opponents.
Look at the pronouncements of the recently elected and recently deposed President Morsi of Egypt, however, and you will find little or nothing to suggest that he is aware that there are Egyptians who disagree with him and whose consent must be constantly solicited. It is impossible to discern from his speeches that there is a substantial minority of Egyptian citizens who are Christians, others who are atheists, others who, while following the Muslim way of life, would rather it did not make a show of itself as the state religion.
His view of elections is that they grant an absolute right to impose the ruling party's agenda, and that opponents have lost all right to an agenda of their own. And the response of the army is to say, not so - the only ones with a right to impose their agenda are we, who represent the interests of all Egyptians and not just those of the Muslim Brotherhood. The fact that we have to kill quite a few Egyptians to prove that we represent them is just one of those things.
In our own system the opposition is a legitimate part of the legislative process. Laws are seldom steam-rollered through Parliament without regard for disagreement, and the general assumption is that the final result will be a compromise, an attempt to reconcile the many conflicting interests. This idea of legislation as a compromise is an unusual one. The natural order is that described in the Old Testament, in which kings rule by decree, taking advice perhaps, but not allowing a voice to interests other than their own.
There are aspects of human life in which compromise is either suspect or forbidden. In battle you don't compromise with the enemy. In religion you don't compromise with the devil. And it is when religion intrudes into politics that the political process is most at risk. This is the reason why, in the history of modern Egypt, successive presidents have tried to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power. The Brotherhood believes that law and politics are not about compromise but about obedience to the will of God.
In the 17th Century our country was torn apart by civil war, and at the heart of that civil war was religion - the Puritan desire to impose godly rule on the people of Great Britain regardless of whether they wanted it, and the leaning of the Stuart Kings towards a Roman Catholic faith that had become deeply antipathetic to the majority and a vehicle for unwanted foreign interference. In a civil war both sides behave badly, precisely because the spirit of compromise has fled from the scene. The solution is not to impose a new set of decrees from on high, but to make room for opposition, and the politics of compromise. This was recognised at the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when Parliament was re-established as the supreme legislative institution, and the rights of the people against the sovereign power were reaffirmed the following year in a Bill of Rights.
This raises what for me is the most important question concerning the Middle East today, which is that of reconciling religious obedience and the secular rule of law. That question was debated by the early Church, and indeed raised by Jesus himself, in the parable of the tribute money. In that parable Jesus invites us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. In other words, to obey Caesar when dealing with the ordinary affairs of government, while remaining obedient in our personal life to the commands of religion. His assumption was that we could reconcile the one obedience with the other, since the commandments of religion are simple and obvious. Indeed, there are only two of them, namely to love God entirely and your neighbour as yourself. Jesus rightly assumed that those two commandments would never jeopardise the legitimate demands of government, and this assumption was built into its pronouncements by the early church.
Of course, there is a long history of conflict in Europe between Pope and Emperor, and between religious enthusiasm and the secular law. But it is fair to say that by the end of the 17th Century, as the Enlightenment spread its influence far and wide across our civilisation, it was beginning to be accepted that we manage our affairs in this world by passing our own laws, that these laws are man-made, secular, and if possible neutral when it comes to the various religions that compete within the state. In any apparent clash between secular law and religious obedience, it has become accepted in our society that secular law must prevail. The hope has been that the two spheres of duty, the sacred and the secular, are sufficiently separate, so that there would in any case be little or no overlap between them. To put it bluntly, religion, in our society, has become a private affair, which makes no demands of the public as a whole.
The privatisation of religion has not occurred everywhere in the modern world, and certainly not in the Muslim world. Today we see a Turkey led to the brink of civil unrest by an Islamic Prime Minister in rebellion against the secular state. We see an Egypt in which the army has stepped in to depose a President who wishes to govern Egypt by Islamic law. We see a region-wide conflict between the Sunni and Shi'ah versions of the faith, which is now tearing Syria apart. And all across the Middle East, freedom of speech, association and religion are under attack. Why is this, and what should we do about it? I shall address those questions next week.
