His woman activist acquaintance told him of the threats she received campaigning for a no vote. She received a text message from someone warning against her work and threatened to throw acid in her face if she did not stop. In the hours before the referendum as well, rumors swept the poor neighborhoods of Cairo that the Copts, the Christians, were campaigning against the amendments, so it was a religious duty of all Muslims to vote yes. Otherwise, Islam would be removed as the country’s official religion, governed by Sharia, and Egypt would be turned into a Christian country.”

And in trying to fathom the attraction of Islam to all these Muslims who voted as the Brotherhood wanted, one imagines that what Islam means to Egyptian men in particular, and why it is so important to them, is sex. That is, the current and perennial relationships between men and females. What Islam means to them is maintaining the status quo in which women are as held in their place as Negroes used to be in the American South for a century after the Civil War; blacks in South Africa under apartheid and Jews perennially until the late 18th century in the West who were downtrodden and outcast and without rights.

That is who the women in Islam are. And the Brotherhood stands for the status quo.

It also stands politically for the status quo on display in Iran where there is no separation between the political and the religious establishments. The Khomeini revolution led to a parliament of priests.

What these Muslims need desperately is what Ataturk gave them, and Erdogan & Co. are trying to undo: the separation of if not church and state then mosque and state. That is what is wrong with Sharia law: it is the melding of the two realms which is a lethal combination.

This after all was the sin of the Hasmonaim, the Maccabees, who became corrupted because as priests they had no right to assume political power which they did.

What the Brotherhood represents is the rearguard action of Muslim men against a Reformation in the Protestant mold, when the monarchs of Europe declared independence from Rome. Quite a struggle that was.

Islam everywhere it is dominant is mixed up with political power and government and is the official religion of the state. And in every one of these states there is no democracy as the Judeo-Christian West developed it.

Islam is synonymous with tyranny. It is a religion which produces tyrants for political leaders, corrupt criminals.

For a few years in the 1990s I taught refugees from the old Soviet Union and marveled at their stories and the history of where they came from and what it was like to live under such tyranny. Russia of the Czars, then came Lenin and Stalin, these monsters. And as I heard the stories I compared the political leaders there to those in the United States, to the then 40 presidents in American history. A few were innocuous, maybe a few of dubious ethics but overall these were good men, and not a one of them like a Stalin who murdered scores of millions of his own people, or a Saddam Hussein who gassed his own people.

Islam is a menace…