I recently took part in a televised interview on the future of the presidency in Egypt, prompted by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi’s recent announcement that he does not intend to amend the constitution to extend his term beyond 2030.

What struck me was how widely the announcement was celebrated, as if respecting the constitution had become something exceptional and worthy of applause rather than a natural obligation on anyone who holds public office, the president first among them.

I say this in appreciation of the announcement and not to diminish it. The constitution is not a gift from the ruler to the people. It is the nation’s contract and the document that sets out the limits of power, safeguards rights, and guarantees the peaceful transfer of authority.

Respecting it should never come as a surprise. It is violating it that should be impossible.

During the televised discussion, the conversation turned to the president’s proposal to prepare people capable of assuming the presidency, drawn from the holders of advanced academic degrees, through a 30-month training programme at the Military Academy.

My response was clear: preparing leaders is commendable, but we must not confuse qualifying citizens for responsibility with requiring them to pass through a particular institution before they may exercise their constitutional right to stand for office.

Article 141of the constitution sets out the conditions for presidential candidacy, and neither a doctorate nor prior military training is among them. There is a fundamental difference between an optional leadership programme and a mandatory gateway to candidacy.

In a democratic state, a president is not appointed after passing an examination set by the authorities in power; he is chosen by the people in free elections. A doctorate attests to specialisation and research ability, not to political wisdom, integrity, or the capacity to build national consensus. The Military Academy is an institution with its own standing, but the state cannot be reduced to any single institution, civilian or military. The homeland belongs to all its citizens.

Then came a question that opened the door wider than I had expected. The host of the TV programme asked me, “would you accept a Christian as prime minister of Egypt?”

My answer was simple – “why not?” I went further and said that the conditions for running for any office, the presidency included, make no distinction between Muslim and Christian, or between male and female for that matter. What matters is meeting the constitutional and legal requirements, competence, and public acceptance as expressed through free and fair elections.

I was not offering a religious opinion; I was speaking about a constitutional principle: equality of citizenship. Yet the reactions surprised me more than the question itself. People asserted that a woman could not rule Egypt and that a Christian could not become president of the republic. Some even cited the constitution as forbidding it.

It was then that I realised that we are facing not merely a difference of opinion, but a deeper flaw in how we understand the relationship between religion and state and between the constitutional text and social culture.

Article 141 of the constitution sets out the conditions for presidential candidacy. Among them are Egyptian nationality and Egyptian parentage, enjoyment of civil and political rights, completion of military service or legal exemption, a minimum age of 40, and any other conditions specified by law.

It requires neither a doctorate nor prior military training. Nowhere does it require the candidate to be Muslim or male. Article 53 establishes equality before the law and prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, belief, or sex, while Article 11 affirms the state’s commitment to equality between women and men in civil, political, and other rights.

As for Article 2, which states that Islam is the religion of the state and that the principles of Islamic Sharia are the principal source of legislation, it contains no stipulation that the president must be Muslim. We must distinguish between the constitutional identity of the state and the political rights of its citizens.

Egypt, with its history and its human fabric, belongs to no single community over another, nor to one sex over the other. If Egyptians are equal in their duties, how can some be less than others in their rights?

Citizenship that stops at certain limits is not full citizenship. It is conditional equality.

This raises a philosophical question that goes beyond the legal texts: is democracy merely majority rule, or is it also a system that protects a minority’s right to compete on equal terms?

It is natural for the culture and values of the majority to be reflected in public life, but democracy does not mean turning the majority’s identity into a precondition for monopolising power. The majority chooses who governs, but it has no right to strip a minority of its right to put itself forward for that choice.

There is a vast difference between a voter who rejects a candidate because he is unconvinced by the candidate’s programme or competence and one who believes that, that candidate has no right to run in the first place because of his religion or sex.

The first is democratic practice; the second negates the principle of equality on which the constitutional state rests. The right to run is also not a guarantee of victory.

I am not calling for the election of a Christian because he is Christian, or of a female because she is a woman, just as I am not calling for electing a Muslim because he is Muslim, or a male because he is a man.

I am calling for competence, integrity, and vision to be the criteria, and for the ballot box, not prejudgements about identity, to decide between contenders.

Building democracy, therefore, runs deeper than drafting a good constitution. It requires genuine political parties, independent institutions, a free press, and an education that teaches each generation that the nation rests on the diversity of its citizens, not on a single opinion, a single creed, or a single sex.

Perhaps the most troubling thing that the reactions to what I said in the TV interview revealed was not that some people reject the idea of a Christian or female president. That is a personal preference open to debate.

What troubled me most was their belief that this rejection is written into the constitution, a moment in which what society is used to, becomes confused with what the law prescribes. It is here that the responsibility of intellectuals, educators, and the media lies in not imposing new convictions, but in helping people distinguish between constitutional fact and personal opinion.

Let me return to where I began.

I welcome the president’s affirmation that he will respect the constitutional term. But I hope we reach a day when respecting the constitution needs no celebration, and when talk of a woman’s or a Christian’s right to run for president no longer provokes such astonishment, because equality will have become a natural part of our social culture.

What is required is not that we elect a woman or a Christian as president, but that we do not prevent them from dreaming of it, from seeking it, and from submitting, like everyone else, to the will of the people.

A nation in which duties are equal must be a nation in which rights are equal.

The constitution we respect when power changes hands must be respected just as much when deciding who has the right to hold it.

In the world of politics, events are not measured only by the physical destruction they cause, but by the messages they carry, and by the shifts they force in the calculations of states.

The question that has preoccupied many is: who did this? But it is not the only question, and perhaps not the most important one. Before identifying the perpetrator, it is worth understanding why this particular target was chosen, why the attack occurred at this particular moment, and who stands to benefit.

For decades we grew accustomed to wars being tied to military fronts, air bases, and naval fleets. Today, the nature of conflict has changed. Ports, shipping lanes, energy facilities, and undersea communications cables have become targets no less significant than military bases. The world no longer lives solely by the balance of power, but by the balance of economy, energy, and supply chains.

From this standpoint, Damietta port was not targeted, in my view, because it is an Egyptian port, but because it represents a point of connection between trade, energy, and the Mediterranean. And if the targeted vessel was American, then the message appears directed more at what it represents than at the place where it docks.

This distinction matters a great deal.

The goal, as I see it, was not to draw Egypt into the war, but to draw the Mediterranean into the equations of war.

It is a message declaring that the conflict is no longer confined to the Gulf or the Red Sea, and that the world’s energy corridors as a whole can become part of the theatre of operations. It is an attempt to expand the space of anxiety more than to expand the space of fire.

From here, the true beneficiary is not necessarily whoever carried out the operation, but whoever succeeds in changing the world’s understanding of what security means.

If shipping companies, insurance markets, and energy investors come to believe that the eastern Mediterranean is no longer a safe zone, then the political objective of the attack will have been achieved even if the material damage was limited.

For this reason, Egypt’s response deserves reflection and appreciation.

The state was not drawn into hasty accusations, nor did it react with emotion; instead, it focused on three things: investigation, securing the facilities, and the continued operation of the port. This is a message no less important than the attack itself, because the gravest danger in such episodes is that fear itself becomes an economic reality.

As for the United States, it is natural that it would view the incident as part of the equation of mutual deterrence in the region, while other parties will seek to exploit the ambiguity surrounding the operation — because in modern warfare, ambiguity has become as much a political tool as an intelligence one.

The world has already entered a new era of conflict, one in which drones no longer target armies alone, but target trust itself. And trust is the backbone of the global economy. If confidence in the security of ports, or in the stability of trade routes, is shaken, the effects ripple outward into energy prices, insurance costs, and investment flows — even if the damage on the ground amounts to no more than a few hours of disruption.

Herein lies the deeper lesson.

Protecting a nation’s security can no longer be confined to protecting its borders; it now extends to protecting the nation’s image as a stable and safe space for investment and trade. In this light, the fact that Damietta port continued operating, and that shipping traffic was not interrupted, was not merely a security success — it was a political and economic success as well, because it defeated a significant part of the message the attackers sought to deliver.

We live in a time when messages have become more dangerous than bullets, and when the impact of a drone is sometimes measured less by the physical damage it inflicts than by the doubt it plants in the markets. The real challenge facing states today, then, is no longer only to shoot down aircraft, but to prevent adversaries from shooting down trust.

*”In politics, the deadliest weapon is not the one that strikes its target, but the one that changes how the world thinks about the meaning of security.”*

We must begin by agreeing that at no point in our long history has humanity existed in a definitive, completed form.

Everything we call “human nature” today is, in truth, a transient stage in a journey that has not yet been completed—and perhaps never will be.

We speak of “male” and “female” as though we were describing two fixed realities. Modern biology suggests, however, that they also involve dynamic hormonal balances, influenced by the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the age in which we live.

Are we, then, today in the midst of a transition that we cannot yet see?

The question is not merely rhetorical. An accumulating body of scientific observations, emerging from different continents and unrelated research institutions, suggests that the hormonal boundaries that have distinguished masculinity and femininity throughout centuries of human consciousness may, in recent decades, be shifting closer together.

A decline in testosterone levels among men appears alongside a rise in hyperandrogenic disorders among women. These may seem, at first glance, to be separate phenomena. However, they could equally represent a shift in human biology unfolding before our eyes, while we remain ignorant of its source and the course it might take.

While this essay does not claim to possess the answer, it aims to highlight the seriousness of the question by first considering its scientific and then its philosophical implications without confusing what we know with reasonable certainty with what we still merely speculate.

The symptom before the diagnosis

The well-known Massachusetts Male Aging Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in this field, found that a sixty-year-old man whose testosterone was measured in 2004 had a level approximately 17 percent lower than that of a man of the same age measured in 1987.

In other words, the difference could not be explained simply by aging; it suggested a genuine generational shift. Similar trends have been reported in Denmark and the United States, extending even to adolescents and young men who have not yet reached the age at which such declines were traditionally expected.

Conversely, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a disorder characterized in large part by excess androgen activity in females, has seen a substantial increase in the number of affected women worldwide over roughly three decades—from around 37 million women in 1990 to nearly 70 million in 2021, according to Global Burden of Disease data.

The temptation, of course, is to rush to attribute the two phenomena to reasons such as the modern chemical environment, industrialized diets, or the pressures of contemporary life.

All of these hypotheses do, in fact, have some scientific support—from obesity and insulin resistance to endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastics and pesticides to changing patterns of sleep, temperature, and physical activity.

Scientific integrity, however, requires us not to reduce the phenomenon to one definitive cause. Researchers themselves, even in the most recent literature, speak of “multiple forces acting simultaneously,” rather than of a single explanatory key.

Perhaps that multiplicity is itself the first lesson: the human body does not respond to one factor alone. It responds to the totality of the life it lives.

The mechanism of balance across history

There is a historical fact that deserves more careful reflection than it usually receives.

After the Second World War, the ratio of men to women in Germany fell sharply, particularly among those between the ages of twenty and forty, as a result of deaths, prisoners of war, and the missing. This demographic imbalance effectively persisted until the affected generation reached its mid-forties. In other words, the generation that paid the price of the war never truly “recovered” from its numerical imbalance during its own lifetime.

Where, then, did the “return to balance” we often speak of actually occur?

It did not happen within the damaged generation, but through the generation born after it. Once normal patterns of childbirth resumed, the ratio of male to female births returned to its longstanding biological pattern: approximately 106 boys for every 100 girls.

The species did not repair its imbalance by restoring those who had been lost. It moved beyond them, toward a new version of itself.

This point is philosophically deeper than it may first appear.

The balance we are discussing is not necessarily an individual property; it may be a property of the species that transcends individuals themselves. The individual may be injured and never recover, while the species continues—utterly indifferent to the fate of any single member—toward its underlying equilibrium.

If this is true at the level of numbers, might something similar also occur at the level of hormones?

Could we, the members of a generation witnessing declining testosterone in men and rising androgen excess in some women, represent a generation undergoing a disturbance that will not itself be “corrected”? Could a new equilibrium emerge through our children or grandchildren—an equilibrium that may not even resemble the old one?

The body that remembers

Here, a relatively young scientific field enters the heart of the discussion: epigenetics.

Its central insight is that the body does not change only through alterations in the genetic sequence itself—a process so slow that it is often measured across thousands of years—but also through a much faster mechanism: chemical marks attached to genes that can activate some and silence others without changing a single letter of the underlying genetic “text.”

Environment, nutrition, and stress tend to influence these epigenetic marks. In some documented circumstances, their effects may even extend across generations.

In this sense, the body does not entirely forget what it has endured. Yet it does not tell us its story in the language of conscious memory. It speaks, rather, through the languages of biology and regulation.

Our grandmother who lived through famine or war; our father who breathed the air of a city saturated with industrial compounds; our mother who, during pregnancy, consumed foods containing substances that did not exist a century ago—all may have contributed, directly or indirectly, to subtle biological signatures in the cells from which we emerged, without intending to do so and without our possessing, through ordinary consciousness, the key to reading them.

This does not mean that every hormonal change observed today is the direct inherited consequence of ancestral trauma. The science in this field is still developing, and findings established in laboratory animals cannot always be translated with certainty to human beings.

But it offers us a powerful philosophical principle: the present generation is not merely a copy of the one before it, but a modified reading of it.

And the “human nature” of which we speak with such confidence may, in truth, be a draft partially rewritten with every generation.

The hybrid threshold

So far, we have gathered three threads: an observed hormonal phenomenon affecting both sexes; a historical mechanism suggesting that populations restore balance across generations rather than within individual lives; and a field of science telling us that the body may carry environmentally influenced biological memory.

Where might these three threads lead if, at this point and only at this point, we allow ourselves one philosophical step beyond what the laboratory can currently prove?

I pose the question cautiously:

Could some of what we now call “hormonal disturbance,” when viewed across a timescale far longer than a single human life, be an early indication of a human form different from the one we have known?

I do not necessarily mean “hybrid” in the familiar technological sense—the merging of human beings with machines or biological digitalization—although this is one of the possibilities seriously discussed in the literature of posthumanism.

I mean something deeper and quieter: the possibility that the true hybrid of the future may be entirely biological and environmental—a human being whose expressions of masculinity and femininity emerge from a long chemical negotiation between the human body and an environment created by humanity itself.

We may never have intended to create a third or transformed biological state. Yet perhaps, through the world we have constructed around ourselves, we may participate in changes we did not consciously design.

This possibility deserves philosophical consideration not because it is certain—it is not—but because it reformulates an ancient question:

Is the “human being” a fixed essence that we are required to preserve, or a transient form that we are entrusted to inhabit faithfully in our own time, before passing it on to those who come after us—modified, just as we ourselves received it already modified by those who came before?

The civilizations we have studied for so long—their rise and fall, their revolutions and reforms—are all stories of social forms that change and disappear.

Why, then, should we assume that the biological form of the human being alone is exempt from the possibility of change?

Conclusion

This essay is not a warning, for there is nothing here that calls for panic, nor a form of reassurance, for we cannot give a definite answer with certainty to a question whose boundaries science itself is still exploring.

After all, the transformations we are discussing are slow, measured in generations rather than years.

This essay, however, proposes a way of seeing.

The “human being” in whose name we speak, whose nature we defend, and whose transformation we fear has never been a single preserved form. Humanity has been a succession of forms, each of which, in its own moment, may have imagined itself to be the final image.

Perhaps the deepest value of this reflection is that it teaches us a humility we urgently need: to reconsider our certainty about what is “natural” and “unnatural” in our bodies and in the bodies of our children; to observe change with the curiosity of the scientist rather than the rigidity of fear; and to leave to future generations, just as previous generations left to us, the unfinished draft of a human body.

A draft that has not yet been completed—and perhaps never will be.

For its completion may be precisely what would mark its end.