The United Arab Emirates (UAE) President, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, issued a new law for electronic crimes that will punish anyone who tries to overthrow the government, hold illegal demonstrations, or affect the dignity of the state by making fun of or taunting the rulers of the emirates.

This law amended the previous law, which was issued in 2006. The former law for electronic crimes stated that anyone who promotes pornography or exposure of the heavenly religions is sentenced to prison.

The new law states that any person who uses the internet to harm the reputation, prestige any of its institutions or its chairman or his deputy or rulers or guardians’ royal family or deputy governors or flag or national anthem or symbols, will be punished. The punishment will be by imprisonment, according to the new law.

Also, the new law states it is illegal for any person who establish, manage or supervise a site on the Internet to call to the overthrowing or change of the regime or government, capture or to disable the provisions of the constitution or laws of the country.

The law also calls for imprisonment for those who use the Internet in the “planning, organization, promotion, or calling for demonstrations or marches without a license from the authorities.”

The UAE, which is one of the richest countries in the world, has not seen any massive protests during the uproar of the Arab Spring. The authorities have arrested, since the beginning of the year, about 60 locals accused of threatening the security of the country according to UAE official resources.

The UAE authorities announced in mid-July that it planned to dismantle a group that claimed to be plotting against security and opposed the constitutions of the Gulf states. On November 4, they group went to trial, a process which is still ongoing.

The Dubai Chief of Police, Dahi Khalfan, accused The Muslim Brotherhood party of attempting to overthrow the Arabian Gulf governments; the cell members who were arrested were charged with conspiring against state security and declaring their allegiance to the party. Most of them were using social media websites such as twitter and Facebook to call for public demonstration in the country.

This law might affect the social media coverage of the events in UAE; channels which played a very important role during the Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan and Yemeni revolutions. Most of the demonstrations in these countries were mainly organized by Facebook and Twitter  activists. It will definitely affect the right to self-expression in the country because the written thought of people could be considered anti-government by law, thus forcing everything to think twice before saying anything.

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The new Egyptian Prime Minister and cabinet have been sworn in under great controversy. It’s the first government since the election of President Mohamed Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood, who became the first freely elected president of the country.

The new Prime Minister Hesham Kandil has pledged the Egyptian people to support the new government; he promised it would be a representative government that would not be under the Muslim Brotherhood domain. Most of the new figures are technocratic figures that have nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, but still the Brotherhood has taken four ministries, including the Ministry of Information.

Many protesters in the past month made the new government taking office very difficult, the protesters camped in Tahrir Square for many days which resulted in a quicker trial for the former president Hosni Mubarak.

The new government will face heavy tasks; the country is facing a lot of troubles because of the tenuous security situation, sectarian violence has erupted in Egypt in the past weeks, tensions are usually between Egypt’s majority Muslims and minority Christians. Almost 10 percent of Egypt’s 82 million people are Christian; the majority of the Egyptians are Muslims. Mubarak’s regime maintained a tight control on Islamists.

Other serious problems the new government will have to face are: widespread power, water outage, and water shortage.

Prime Minister Kandil is aware of the country challenges, at a press conference he stated: “We are all Egyptians in the Arab Republic of Egypt. The coming period is not easy, to say the least, and we are all in the same boat.”

Kandil’s statement was made after a Muslim mob torched Christian homes and damaged the local church in a village south of Cairo. It also was following a police confrontation against protesters who went on a rampage against a luxury hotel in Cairo after the police tried to collect payments; in this chaos a person was killed.

The cabinet has 35 members and includes only two women, one of them Christian. The new Prime Minister is a devout Muslim, this has angered many liberals and leftists, but still Kandil maintains he has no formal link with any Muslim political party. But still Morsi has been criticized for not giving women and Christians more participation in the government.

But these are not all of Egypt problems, the country’s unstable situation has made that more than a half of foreign currency reserves have been taken out  in the last 18 months. Also tourism, one of the Egypt’s greatest incomes, is facing hard times.

Image Courtesy of   Hossam el-Hamalawy حسام الحملاوي

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What if the whole domino set falls? What then? Will a new hopeful Middle East arise from the ashes of its former self or will it end up being the theocratic extremist monster of the world, a title it seems to hold today.

The Middle East has yet to wrestle with issues of separation of church and state in any conclusive manner. Although the debate has been raging on for centuries among Islamic scholars, the current changes taking place in the different countries of the region offer a unique opportunity for the debate to take center stage.

With the recent uprisings suggesting that change is in fact being created from the ground up, the degree of separation between organized religion and the state will be dictated by a newly empowered national audience. In doing so, this debate will be contentious and at times slightly dangerous. However if the Middle East is to ever be expected to fix the fundamental issues that currently plague its various institutions, it must learn to do so on its own. That would entail no course correction interventions by world powers, no matter how difficult it is to fight back the urge.

It would be naive to think that democracy and direct public participation will lead to any single government in the region being composed entirely of liberal, western oriented public servants. Islam is a part of the social fabric of these societies. Like evangelicals in America, religion is the preferred narrative of many in the region. The responsibility of figuring out how to temper both religion and liberalism so that they may coexist will fall to the people of the Middle East and they should knowingly invite this new challenge. After all, it is their history and their future that will be at stake.

The president of the United States can lead the international community in this regard by issuing a public statement promising to leave the Middle East dictate its own future. Such a statement would go a long way in fortifying a sense of confidence and ownership among the people. It would simultaneously help dispel whatever rumors and hyper conspiracy theories to come in a region that has a seemingly over abundance of both. However with the unfortunate intervention in Libya,

How exactly the individual countries in the Middle East will look like in the future is quite frankly impossible to tell with any degree of certainty. However a strong combination of both conservative religion and liberal ideals might be the dominant feature of the region, with each country inching towards one or the other. In either case, both will face numerous and ongoing challenges. Conservatives will have to temper their brands to fit within a framework of democracy, while liberals will have to make liberalism fit and adapt into the larger cultural narrative.

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