By Agencies

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Parliamentarians in Egypt are meeting to appoint a 100-member panel that will draft the country's new constitution amid deep polarisation between liberals and Islamists over the process.

The Saturday meeting in Cairo is part of the country's transition to democracy following the revolution which toppled former president Hosni Mubarak after 18 days of widespread protests in February 2011.

It is likely to be part of a weeks-long struggle over the charter that will define Egypt's identity.

Following Egypt's parliamentary elections, which began in November 2011, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement emerged with a majority of seats.

It then stipulated that half of the people charged with writing the new constitution should be sitting parliamentarians.

Put together, the country's liberal parties hold less than one-third of the seats in parliament. On Saturday, Mostafa al-Naggar, the leader of the liberal Justice Party, walked out of the joint session in protest after his proposal that 25 seats in the constituent assembly be reserved for public figures was rejected.

Parliament will also choose 40 reserve candidates.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) controls the most seats in both chambers of parliament, but the party has said that it seeks a constituent assembly with representation for all parties and groups.

The constitution that the assembly will draft will define Egypt's system of government, particularly the balance of power between parliament and the president, role of Islam in the running of the state and society and the political role of the military, which has governed Egypt since Mubarak's fall last year.

'Hijacking' the process

Liberal judges and activists have filed legal challenges to the decision to appoint 50 of the 100 council members from their ranks.

"This can actually result in a very tilted constitution that reflects the interests of only one segment of the population, which is the Islamists," Khaled Fahmy, from the American University in Cairo, said.

Fahmy said the overwhelming influence Islamist parties could have on the writing of a new constitution would "very much" affect the identity of the state.

"In the past two months since parliament sat we have been seeing very interesting proposals for legislative changes affecting women, marriage, divorce, criminal law, education policies ... various things not about the economy, not about foreign policy, but about culture about identity and that is the main card by which Islamists have won this election," he said.

The FJP, however, says that it wants all sectors of Egyptian society represented in the assembly.

In a statement, the party said: "The party's parliamentary bloc is keen to include all political and ideological streams in the assembly, as well as, representing all sectors of Egyptian society ... including youth, women and Copts' representatives."

After the panel writes the constitution, which it will have six months to do, it will be put to a vote in a national referendum. The old 1971 constitution was abolished after the revolution that overthrew Mubarak.