Khaled Alam Eddin presents resignation from Nour Party

The Nour Party’s only minister in former President Mohamed Morsi’s Cabinet is freezing his membership in the party until it accepts his resignation, he told Mada Masr on Tuesday.

“Although I agree with the party on most of its stances and policies, I disagree with some,” he wrote in a statement on his Facebook page. “I am afraid that announcements of my positions at the present time would cause embarrassment for the party or its leadership, especially in this particularly sensitive phase of the history of the nation.”

He declined to comment further on the reasons for his resignation.

Alam Eddin is mostly known for his public, tearful resignation from Morsi’s government in March, citing as his reason the fact that the president was not sharing an adequate amount of power. The fallout between the Nour Party and the Brotherhood opened a critical political gap and left the president and his Islamist group with few allies.

He is leaving the Nour Party at a critical time for political Islam in Egypt. With the Muslim Brotherhood in disarray after the arrest of most of its leadership, the Nour Party is seemingly the only Islamic party with buy-in into the roadmap and the drafting of a new constitution. Officials in the Nour Party’s parent organization, the Salafi Dawah, resigned after the party offered its support to the transition.

In an official statement, the Nour Party had said it decided to partake in the process to preserve Egypt’s identity, a phrase that usually refers to the preservation of articles in the constitution that place Sharia as the foundation for law and governance.

Chief among these were Articles 2 and 219. The first said that Sharia was the main source of legislation, while 219, which was an addition championed by Nour, defined those principles. Article 219 was not present in the constitutional declaration issued after Morsi’s ouster.

Rather than a picture of Alam Eddin, his Facebook page features a message promoting Article 219.

Al-Masry al-Youm had reported that the party would nominate the following members to the 50-person committee: party figures spokesperson Nader Bakkar, deputy heads Ashraf Thabet and Bassam al-Zarqa, and legal adviser Talaat Marzouk, as well as Salafi Dawah Vice President Yasser Borhamy.