*3.1. The Postsecular Impact of the Arab Spring*

Postsecular revolution can be defined as taking place in order to end secularist, religious, and mixed regimes, which legitimize their authoritarian rules by the need to freeze the cleavage between more secular and more religious citizens or by protecting or excluding minorities defined by their belonging to a religious community or a religious ideology. A successful postsecular revolution can be defined by a new arrangemen<sup>t</sup> that cherishes various forms of religious heritage of the society without establishing an exclusivist creed to which all citizens have to conform, be it a civil religion, a traditional faith, or a comprehensive religious doctrine. The deep pluralism of a postsecular society takes di fferences seriously without fearing them. Postsecular societies trust that a politics of becoming that accepts these di fferences but delegitimizes differences of status and class, including the injustices of a corrupt regime, is better off (Barbato 2012, pp. 1081–83). More religious and more secular strata of the population, whether they organize their differences in parties or not, no longer understand this cleavage as a cause for civil war because an electoral victory of the other side is unacceptable. A losers' consent (Anderson 2007) is possible as the winning party is not trying to marginalize the interests and the existence of the defeated, and the next turn to the ballots could have an equally accepted di fferent result. Only those extremists who

do not accept these rules of the democratic game are marginalized and, if necessary, persecuted in due process of law. This is the ideal version. An extension to postsecular power politics of becoming can also see some progress within less ideal circumstances. Egypt can be understood as an example of this.

The broad alliance that protested against the elected Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and the new Islamist but electorally approved constitution and later backed first al-Sisi's coup and then his election as president denied the losers' consent due to the game-changing character of the new rulers' constitution. Despite the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood and others, which violated basic standards of human rights on a massive scale, al-Sisi could be understood as still being on a postsecular path, as he sticks to the view that he once stated in a term paper: "The moderate view is that there is a place of Islamic belief. [ ... ] A common religious understanding among all ethnicities and cultures must exist and there must be consideration given to non-Islamic belief" (El Sisi 2006, p. 11).

Based on these views, al-Sisi became the first Egyptian president who attended a Coptic Christmas Mass in 2015 (Kirkpatrick and Merna 2015). After the murderous attack on a church in 2016, he asked the parliament to lift the legislative ban on major new church buildings and commissioned the construction of the largest cathedral in the Middle East for the new administrative capital of Egypt. In 2019, it was inaugurated. Al-Sisi, a pious Sunni, was able to gain support from Sheik Ahmad al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of al-Azhar and a leading authority in Sunni Islam, who, similar to al-Sisi, visited the new cathedral and supported the right of Christians and Jews to have their buildings of worship protected (Reuters 2019).

Thus, the regime is still authoritarian and exclusivist in terms of marginalizing any kind of Political Islam or other dissenters by authoritarian means. However, the integration effort towards different strata of the population and the shift from secularist nationalism to an interreligious nationalism, bringing together Sunni Muslim and Copts, is a postsecular step forward. It seems to be feasible because al-Sisi, who was once brought into office as minister of defense by Morsi due to his piety, and the coalition that backed initially the military coup to support the continuity of the Arab Spring revolution were united on the common postsecular ground that religion should play a role in public and politics but not as a exclusivist comprehensive doctrine of Political Islam. Given the strength of Political Islam and the decline of secular pan-Arabism, a balanced postsecular society in the full Habermasian sense is not in the offing. However, the current authoritarian rule engages in postsecular power politics of becoming.
