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The judicial authorities responsible for the forthcoming legislative elections have rejected the appeal filed by Ahmed Ezz. He is a former Peoples Assembly representative and head of the parliamentary planning and budget committee, former political bureau member in the Mubarak-era National Democratic Party (NDP), and past and present construction and iron and steel tycoon.

In so doing, they closed an important and divisive political controversy. But that does not mean that the story of Ezz is over. In fact, the judicial ruling will probably give rise to many other thorny questions, prime among them how genuine the liberal idea is in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.

I, among many others, advised Ezz not to put himself forward in this round of legislative polls. While I believed that there was nothing wrong in principle in his trying, I felt that the time was not right and that he would be more effectively politically in his capacity as a businessman and manufacturer than as a parliamentary member.

Nevertheless, perhaps without intending to, and regardless of the legal justifications cited by the court for rejecting his appeal, Ezz has stirred up debates that have put Egyptian liberals in a bind.

If acceptance of the other, equality in the right to express ones opinion and the right to vie for the majority of votes in a democratic poll are cardinal liberal principles, then denying Ezz the chance to compete in the polls represents a major failure for the credibility of the liberalism that many claim to advocate.

Liberalism has a long history in Egypt. It dates to the beginning of the 19th century, when the Napoleonic Expedition left behind some traces of the French Revolution in Egypt and its ideals of freedom and equality. Soon afterwards, the educational missions that Mohamed Ali dispatched to Europe led hundreds to embrace the modernist and liberal ideas produced by Western civilisation.

The writer Rafie Al-Tahtawi was perhaps the first to sow the seeds of liberalism in Egypt. The tree that grew came to include such intellectual and literary luminaries as Ahmed Lutfi Al-Sayyid, Taha Hussein, Abbas Al-Aqqad, Mohamed Hussein Heikal and countless other writers in philosophy, economics and the social sciences.

Despite that lengthy history, liberalism has remained primarily an elitist outlook. Its political application, both under the monarchy and in the republican era, was the disfigurement of a great idea.

The idea was taken up by the public, perhaps for the first time, during the revolutions that fell under the heading of the Arab Spring and that seemed to be a classic case of rebellion against tyranny. Yet, while the majority of those assembled in Tahrir Square in the 25 January Revolution tended toward the liberal left, as attested to by their constant stress on human rights, it later emerged that that liberalism was not rooted deeply enough to prevent the fascistic Muslim Brotherhood from coming to power with the help of some liberal groups and organisations.

A considerable period of time has passed since then. Today, the new liberals are divided between those who pit liberalism against what they call military rule and those who supported and then voted for President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi on the grounds that he, together with the Armed Forces, could halt terrorism and Muslim Brotherhood fascism.

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Liberals, but ...