The problem is that the constitution should have been and was an opportunity, exactly as Moncef Marzouki tried to do, to bring together the secularists and Islamists.

I am talking about anything that is a provocation - ignore it. When something falls under freedom of expression, you can read it and take a critical distance.

It's okay to feel the need for protection if there is a real external threat. But to feel protective from the inside, it's a kind of jail: you get so protective that you cannot get out of the box.

I think many thinkers and activists, even in the Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, and the people who left the Muslim Brotherhood to follow Abou el-Fatouh, these people do have an understanding that the relationship between religion and the state must be re-thought and re-assessed. They're not going to use the concept of secularism in any straightforward way, because the concept of secularism is still far too loaded in that part of the world.

The perception in the Arab world now is that we are having secularists against Islamists, and that's it. So the secularists are progressive; the Islamists are reactionary, conservative. This perception is wrong.

Destroying the nation state are mainly three things: the global economy, global communication technology and global culture. And this is where we are lost in the process. What could be something that can provide us a transversal political sense of belonging? At the end of the day, without an alternative we end up with populism in the name of very narrow identities.

Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.