“You can’t have your apple and eat it too,” goes one proverb. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood is trying its best to prove the opposite.

The Brotherhood likes to be in power and in the streets, be with the revolution and with the remnants, build a fashionable as well as a religious constitution, maintain the peace treaty along with jihadists, and govern by Sharia while encouraging tourism. It is not surprising that all of those issues have turned into mines, which have come to explode under the Brotherhood’s feet, forcing it to escape from each crisis.

“You can’t have your apple and eat it too,” goes one proverb. Yet the Muslim Brotherhood is trying its best to prove the opposite.

The Brotherhood likes to be in power and in the streets, be with the revolution and with the remnants, build a fashionable as well as a religious constitution, maintain the peace treaty along with jihadists, and govern by Sharia while encouraging tourism. It is not surprising that all of those issues have turned into mines, which have come to explode under the Brotherhood’s feet, forcing it to escape from each crisis.

The world is no longer witnessing demonstrations of support for presidents, except maybe under regimes like Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria, the Mullahs’ in Iran or Kim Jong-il’s in North Korea. However, the Brotherhood of “the first elected civilian President in Egypt” still rents buses for its supporters to demonstrate in favor of the president’s decisions.  It is not surprising that those supporters are similar in their appearance, clothes and calls. This similarity is a feature that enhances the totalitarian nature of the demonstrations themselves.

However, the Brotherhood does not give a hoot about the opposition’s criticism against demonstrations of support; what it really cares about is not losing the ‘apple’ of the street, even after it devoured the power by its president’s appointment of himself as an absolute ruler, according to a constitutional declaration that gives him all the authorities.

Since demonstrating in the street does not make sense while it is in power, the Brotherhood is stepping forward, threatening the opposition from demonstrating in the same Tahrir Square where the opposition is protesting against the president’s decisions.

The Internet is another apple the Brotherhood wishes to keep.  The “We are all Khaled Saeed” page – which played a prominent role in calling for the revolution – conducted an opinion poll about the constitutional declaration, but it halted it only a few hours later, announcing that it had noticed thousands of similar comments by different names, all supporting the president. This questions the credibility of the poll as a whole and confirms the opposition’s belief that the Brotherhood has electronic working groups to fake the polls.

In an interview conducted by the American ‘Time’ magazine, however, the president relied on the polls to confirm that 90 percent of people supported him, which is strange, given that Morsi won the presidential election by less than 52 per cent, not to mention the recent divisions sparked by the constitutional declaration, which called on many of those who had previously supported the president to reject him.

Because the revolution is the most important apple and the source of the legitimacy of the new regime, the Brotherhood has begun to accuse opponents of being allied with the remnants of the old regime against the ‘revolutionary president’.  This is another paradox because the Brotherhood is actually aligning with the most dangerous sectors of the old regime, security services and businessmen, let alone that it supported the Military Council in its bloody confrontations with the revolutionists.

The Brotherhood is trying to justify its attack on the judiciary by saying that the latter is an obstacle to “completing the revolution”, which, along with the president’s talk about a “conspiracy” being prepared by the Constitutional Court to restore the Military Council to power, could not be accepted by the opposition. Especially since the president has not taken any action against the other party in the alleged plot, i.e. the army leaderships, since he once again likes to keep the army satisfied, while at the same time issuing warnings against it, and threatening to use it!

The constitution remains the hardest apple to be swallowed. In the Brotherhood’s multiple maneuvers since the revolution, Salafists have been the most important and loyal ally against secular forces and revolutionary youth and activists. But the support of Salafists is not free of charge, and its most important result is their rising ambition from simply maintaining Article II – which makes the principles of Sharia the main source of legislation – to applying Sharia fully and promptly; simply meaning the destruction of the Brotherhood’s pledges towards civil forces and the international community to develop a new democratic and modern constitution.

The more the Brotherhood relies for Salafists’ support, the greater its fear that Salafists may make good on their threat to call for the rejection of the draft constitution. This has eventually led to a draft constitution that contradicts itself; a constitution that calls for fundamental freedoms provided they violate neither the Sharia nor its principles. This will create major obstacles to the rights of belief and expression, as well as the rights of women and minorities; demolish a deeply rooted tradition of civil law in Egypt; and most importantly, roll the apple of the constitution towards a religious state that will destroy the Brotherhood’s claims regarding democracy. And, if the Brotherhood does not make up its mind quickly, it may lose all its apples.