“Egypt is the gift of the Nile for Egyptians and the gift of Egyptians to humanity.” Thus begins the new Egyptian constitution, which, according to preliminary results, was approved by 97.7 per cent of voters this week. The percentage of voters who didn’t read the full document probably also ranges well above ninety—in conversations with many Cairenes, I met only one person who said he had read the whole thing. It’s hard to blame the others. The constitution opens with a strange, rambling preamble that in translation stretches for more than thirteen hundred words, mentioning, in the following order, Allah, Moses, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Refaa the Azharian, Ahmed Orabi, Mostafa Kamel, Mohamed Farid, Saad Zaghloul, Mostafa el-Nahhas, Talaat Harb, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Nile inundates three of the first six sentences. It’s a preamble to everything—not just the constitution but human civilization itself:

In the outset of history, the dawn of human consciousness arose and shone forth in the hearts of our great ancestors, whose goodwill banded together to found the first central State that regulated and organized the life of Egyptians on the banks of the Nile.

The new document replaces the previous constitution, which was prepared under the government of Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who became Egypt’s first democratically elected President, in the summer of 2012. Last year, after massive demonstrations across the nation on June 30th, Morsi was deposed by the military, and his constitution was suspended. But there are many similarities between these two constitutions. Under Morsi, the preamble struck a similar lofty tone; it referred to “the timeless Nile” and ran on for almost nine hundred words. It described itself as the product of “the same civilization that gave humanity the first alphabet, that opened the way to monotheism and the knowledge of the Creator.” Nowadays, it reads like a preamble to hubris—long-winded references to history and culture in a document that died within six months. (The world’s oldest functioning democratic constitution, that of the United States, has a fifty-two-word preamble that does not make a single mention of the past.) In a single century, Egypt has had nine or ten constitutions, depending on how you count them. It has held three constitutional referendums since the Egyptian Arab Spring began, on January 25, 2011.

Along the way, the definition of the revolution has changed. In the 2012 constitution, the first sentence of the preamble included the words “Tahrir Square,” which do not appear in this year’s version. Now the official term is “the January 25 – June 30 Revolution.” There are several references to Christianity, which the Morsi-era preamble did not mention at all. And Morsi’s included the following sentence, which has not been repeated in the new preamble:

Our Armed Forces form a patriotic, professional and neutral national institution that does not interfere in political affairs.

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Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the 97.7-per-cent approval rate is that there is no overt evidence of widespread fraud. But this is why voting is only a small part of what constitutes a democracy; since the revolution, Egypt has held seven fraud-free national votes, and yet the country still doesn’t have a single government official who was elected to his position democratically. (Everybody voted into national office has been subsequently removed by coup or court decision, and local governments have yet to hold elections.) Since Morsi’s ouster, his supporters have been engaged in a bitter struggle with the Army and the police, leaving more than a thousand civilians dead. The courts have ruled the Muslim Brotherhood to be an illegal organization, and the Brothers and many of their supporters have boycotted the referendum. Last month, after a bombing killed sixteen people in the city of Mansoura, the government declared the Brotherhood to be a terrorist group, even though there was no evidence of its involvement. (The Brotherhood publicly denounced the attack.)

In this climate, a number of international monitoring organizations declined to help monitor the vote on the constitution. Alessandro Parziale, the director of the Cairo field office for the Carter Center, told me that the referendum had been so rushed, and the Carter Center received its accreditations so late, that it was unable to make the necessary preparations for a responsible monitoring of the polls. Instead, it is focussing on writing a report about the new constitution and the national situation. “The broader picture is more important than these two days,” Parziale told me. “We don’t think the process has been inclusive. And we think that democracy is all about inclusiveness.”

He noted that the Carter Center didn’t send monitors for last year’s constitutional referendum, either. Under Morsi, too, the climate was deeply undemocratic, with violent clashes taking place across Egypt in the month before the referendum. But at least there had been a vigorous and public campaign against the Morsi constitution. This year, I didn’t see a single sign in Cairo advocating a “no” vote, and a half-dozen people were arrested after they were caught trying to organize such a campaign. When I checked bookstores and newspaper stalls in my neighborhood, I found that every available copy of the constitution already had a big “YES” printed on the cover. The day before the referendum, the High Election Commission held a press conference, and I asked if it was legal for an Egyptian citizen to post a sign calling for people to vote no. Hisham Mokhtar, the commission’s spokesman, refused to answer directly, and his language turned Orwellian. “If some person has been arrested right now,” he said, “then the investigating authority has evidence of their involvement in certain crimes.”

At the polls, few Egyptians seemed bothered by the unfair political climate. The turnout was relatively strong—more than forty-two per cent, significantly higher than during the last referendum. In Ard al Liwa, a poor Cairo neighborhood that previously generated significant support for the Brotherhood, I spent time at three polling stations and failed to meet anybody who told me he had voted no. Some carried pictures of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the minister of defense who led the coup against Morsi and is widely expected to run for President. The most common remark I heard was “Il beled lazem timshi“—“The country needs to move forward.” Egyptians are famous for their optimism, which has been a source of social stability during the past three years. But that frame of mind can also lead to bad political instincts. They want to say yes; they want to believe; they want to be convinced that the next leader will be better. “Egypt will be fine,” Faris Hassan, a middle-aged contractor, told me. “Egypt is mentioned five times in the Koran.”