As we observe from the comfort of our armchairs the social upheaval and political turmoil in Egypt, with millions pouring onto the streets, thousands wounded and hundreds dying, the words of Moses to Pharaoh drifted into His Grace’s mind.This is not quite an Exodus salvation history with a divine commission, and yet it may be for those who have lived for decades under the yoke of Mubarak’s oppression, confiscation and exploitation. Three-and-a-half millennia ago, the Lord chose a naturalised Egyptian by the name of Moses to free Israel from bondage; today, almost the whole of Egypt seems to have chosen themselves to be the agency of revolution.
Emancipation from absolutism and slavery is always a risk, especially when the strongman keeps hardening his heart, announcing his imminent departure and then deciding that the country really can't do without him. But it is the readiness to confront Pharaoh that sets the revolutionary narrative in motion and which eventuates in the changed circumstances of the slave community and the commitment to an alternative form of public power.
It won’t embrace the holiness of YHWH, of course, for Allah prefers an alternative totalising reality which diminishes the status of the neighbour. But what we have in the plot of the 'Lord versus Pharaoh' is the legitimacy of protest: human initiative is indispensible in bringing about an alternative mode of public power and institutional order.
From encounter, through confrontation to disruption, the Egyptians are replicating their empire’s history. But they should heed from that history the irony that Solomon became Israel’s Pharaoh, with a highly centralised economy and an ideology of arrogant, autonomous totalism generated by the legitimacy associated with the Temple. And so Israel was placed under a new economic bondage which ended the covenantal practice of public power.
There is nothing new under the sun.
In considering the limitations imposed on human authority, one cannot divorce human political economy from the doctrine of God. For it is that which distinguishes between generous compassion and brutalising totalism; determines the social contract between rich and poor; dictates the attitude towards the non-believer; and ordains war and peace.
For Israel, the refrain ‘You were slaves in Egypt’ became an everlasting leitmotif which yielded humility, obedience, gratitude and social relationship.
And we see glimpses of relationship in this outbreak of civil war: new bonds of friendship between Christians and Muslims: watching each other’s homes, guarding each other’s holy sites, sitting in each other’s services of worship; standing and prostrating shoulder-to-shoulder for peace, liberty and security.
For this is not a religious conflict, though there are some who would like to make it so.
Egypt is on the brink either of greater liberty and democracy, or of an even greater totalising authoritarianism. Whether she embraces secularism or Islamism remains to be seen.But we should listen carefully to the concerns of our brothers and sisters on the ground, and remind ourselves that social and political revolutions in the Middle East tend not to result in greater freedom for Christians.
As one Pharaoh is entombed, another is enthroned.
And so it continues.
There is nothing new under the sun.
