Nour Party to remain in constitutional committee

The Nour Party has criticized the 50-member constitutional committee tasked with amending the 2012 Constitution as unbalanced and representative of only one political current.

Deputy Nour Party head Shaaban Abdel-Alim is quoted by Al-Shorouk privately owned daily as saying that his party will nonetheless remain in the committee because “dialogue is the best way to solve problems.”

On Monday, Nour Party representative Bassam al-Zarqa walked out of a committee meeting following a heated discussion about the fate of article 219 in the 2012 Constitution ratified by former President Mohamed Morsi.

Other members of the committee reportedly refused to include Article 219 — which deals with the sources of Sharia rules — in the amendments.

Nour Party head Younes Makhyoun meanwhile said that the committee “has got off to a bad start” and that its spokesperson journalist Mohamed al-Salmawy “talks as if he isn’t a member of the Egyptian people and as if he’s living on another planet.”

According to a statement on the Nour Party’s official website, Makhyoun told the Al-Arabiya satellite channel that Salmawy is a source of bad publicity for the committee and that all his statements are “disastrous and shocking to the Egyptian people.” Specifically, Makhyoun criticized made reference to Salmawy’s statements that the constitution should not mention religion or make reference to any particular religious denomination.

Makhyoun also noted that secularists and leftists dominate the committee and that they are seeking to impose their opinions and vision on others.

The Nour Party head said that while his party wants the new constitution to see the light of day as soon as possible, this should not be at the expense of identity and Sharia and that if articles concerning identity come under attack, the Nour Party may revise its position.

However, Nour Party leader Khaled Alam Eddin told Mada Masr on Monday that Zarqa’s withdrawal from the committee was in objection to “the mechanism of the discussion and the preconceived opinions of the committee [members].”