According to
Ahram Online, on Monday night Egypt's new interim president Adly Mansour issued a 33-article Interim Constitutional Declaration (
full text in Arabic) that will remain in place during the current transitional period.
Al-Monitor has published an analysis of the document's provisions. Here is what it has to say about the document's treatment of religion:
The constitutional declaration shows the strong leverage the Salafist Al-Nour party has on the transitional process.... [Three provisions of the former constitution] have been merged into a unique, new, Article 1...:
“The Arab Republic Of Egypt is a state whose system is democratic, based on the principle of citizenship; Islam is the religion of the state; Arabic is its official language; and the principles of Islamic Sharia — which include its general evidences, its fundamental and jurisprudential rules, and its recognized sources in the doctrines of the people of the Sunna and Jam’aa (i.e., Sunnism) — are the main source of legislation.”...
...[T]he Salafists managed to keep the restriction of freedom of religious worship to the “three celestial religions” in Article 7 (i.e., Christianity, Islam and Judaism), which was not the case under the 1971 Constitution but became so in the 2012 version, under Salafist influence. The 1971 Constitution had also stated that freedom of belief was “absolute,” while the 2012 Constitution and the charter denoted it as “protected.” ... One thing that has been dropped is the express reference to Al-Azhar’s role in expressing a supposedly non-binding opinion on Sharia matters pertaining to draft legislation....
The declaration retains the more flexible ban on parties that “discriminate on the basis of ... religion,” but does not return the outright ban on religion-based parties that existed in the 1971 Constitution. This is another move to accommodate Islamists into the transition.
