The deposing of Egyptian President Morsi is rightly being greeted with mixed feelings. One the one hand, he was insinuating his Islamic Brotherhood cohorts into government positions and creating policies that further islamicized the country while doing blessed little to deal with the country's economic difficulties. And his ouster is very, very widely supported among the population, though his proponents are now flexing their street muscle. On the other hand, he was deposed by the strong hand of the army, not impeached through the processes of law. What Egypt lacks, and (like virtually all of its neighbors) needs, is a set of institutions that allow these sort of issues to be decided by process, not by ad hoc protests, subterfuge or the intervention of military power.

Egypt may yet pull through, but this highlights another issue, also very pertinent to the region's politics, and that is that the institutions that must be created have to be secular. Orthodoxy, be it Islamic, Jewish, or right-wing Republican, is the enemy of process because it permits no compromise, and compromise is the mortar that holds the edifice of a society together. Unilateral, unquestioned exercise of power by one person or group, though often efficient (Mussolini and the trains thing, you know) by definitely create a politics of exclusion and alienation and guess what, this leads to violence nearly always because the disaffected have no legitimate channel to voice grievance and feel they are being heard. They hit the streets, and inevitably, the military has to clamp down and the cycle continues. Brute force controls. We have seen this ourselves in the U.S., but our institutions have held because people know their votes count (pace the Roberts Court's recent decisions, that is).

Egypt is not so lucky. And remember this is, at root, about the role of religion in an Islamic society. And Egypt is not alone, Syria's civil war is mired by the same problem: the tribalism of religion. By this I mean the tendency to turn religious differences into an us-versus-them, all-or-nothing conflict, instead of searching for a middle ground. The Tea Party does exactly the same thing in the U.S. By insisting on orthodoxy, what should be a debate becomes a war. The U.S. will muddle through (as the Brits say) because the Tea Party is its own worst enemy, and again, because we already have solid institutions--secular institutions that have proven their worth time and time again, despite Newt Gingrich, his acolytes and political descendants.

The challenge in Egypt, in other Islamic countries, and, yes, in Israel is to get the populace to understand that a secular society is not anti-religion, it is the only means to protect religion from . . . religion. Ironic,isn't it. But if the Sunnis want to be protected from the Shias, if the Shias want to be protected from the Sunnis, if teh Jews want to be protected from both of them--and vice versa, they secular institutions respecting freedom of religion must be put in place. Israel actually has a court system that tries to do its job, but the constitutional structure in Israel (proportional representation--only Italy has anything similar, QED) plus the institutionalization of Orthodox Judaism into governmental functioning (they feel quite free to discriminate against other Jews, and do) have dealt Israel a set of similar issue that can only be solved by more determinedly secular institutions there as well.

What would this look like? Very simple. It would look like the U.S. Bill of Rights (which we got from the Brits, don't forget), starting with the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom through the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses. To whit: "Congress shall make no law respecting a establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The wording would have to be modernized, but you get the point: no official national religion and no interfering with anyone's religious practices.

They've served pretty well for us. It isn't easy, but it does work.