Ami Ayalon Introduction The
recent cause célèbre known as “the Abu Zayd affair”—the philosophy
professor pronounced an apostate by a state court—has been described as
the epitome of a culture war in today’s Egypt. This struggle over the
country’s soul has been going on for over a century, with varying degrees
of intensity. Observers have never been, nor are they now, in agreement
over the essence and outcome of its earlier phases. And today, as it
continues to rage with passion, the range of assessments is as broad as
ever. Future historians will be better equipped to appraise the historical
significance of the most recent developments. But it is already quite
clear that the Abu Zayd affair and several other cases of a similar nature
are major milestones in this battle. In the present study I propose to
explore these developments as a reflection of cultural tensions in Egypt
and place them in a historical context. This may yield a preliminary
perspective on the country’s search for orientation as it approaches the
end of the twentieth century. A
society’s “cultural orientation” is an elusive notion. Ideas aired by the
articulate members of a community, if readily accessible to the observer,
do not necessarily express views of its other segments. Probing the
thinking, sentiments and beliefs of an entire society requires a broad
variety of research methods, taken from a host of scholarly disciplines,
and these are rarely integrated in a single study.[1]It
would thus be somewhat pretentious for a historian to try and capture an
exhaustive picture of a community’s cultural reality, the more so when
that society is as large and diverse as Egypt, still more when the period
in question is one of accelerated change. The present study aims at a more
modest goal. Its chief heroes are the society’s leading exponents of
political and cultural ideas, its main focus the tension between the
different courses they have sought to chart for the country. The impact of
this debate on the largely passive majority of that society thus remains
outside the scope of this exploration. Scholarship and Apostasy
Abu
Zayd, 1992
The story of Abu Zayd has been widely told by others, hence we can make do with a brief account highlighting the points relevant to our discussion.[2] Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (born 1943) was assistant professor in the Department of Arabic, Faculty of Letters, at Cairo University. In May 1992 he applied for promotion to the rank of professor, based on an output of three books and many articles dealing mostly with the critique of Islamic texts and modern Islamic discourse. An academic committee examined the file for about seven months and consulted with external experts. In December 1992 it announced its decision to turn down the application. The rejection was championed by one of the committee members, linguistics professor ‘Abd al-Sabur Shahin, who argued that Abu Zayd’s works, especially his book, Naqd al-khitab al-dini ( A Critique of Religious Discourse), contained words of blasphemy. Abu Zayd, he charged, ridiculed the Qur’an by casting doubt on such notions as paradise, hell and the day of resurrection, and by treating the Holy Book as if it were simply the composition of a human being. This meant that Abu Zayd was a heretic (mulhid) and an apostate (murtadd). Shahin—who may have been motivated by a personal vendetta against Abu Zayd[3]—did not stop at defeating his academic promotion. He took the matter out of the university. In April 1993, in a Friday sermon at ‘Umar bin al-‘As mosque in Cairo, Shahin publicly pronounced Abu Zayd an apostate. The move was not without certain practical significance: as a murtadd, Abu Zayd could not remain married to his Muslim wife, Ibtihal Yunis, professor of French literature at Cairo University; by a more rigorous interpretation, he could face the death penalty. Shahin’s pronouncement was soon echoed in other mosques, prompting a group of Islamist lawyers to file an appeal to a Family Court in Cairo to separate Abu Zayd from his wife. In January 1994 the court ruled the case inadmissible, since the plaintiff had no personal standing in the matter. At that point the case seemed to have been closed. Abu Zayd himself published a treatise, Al-tafkir fi zaman al-takfir (Thought in an Age of Charges-of-Unbelief), offering a postmortem of his recent experience. Promoted to the rank of professor in May 1995, Abu Zayd optimistically resumed teaching and research in full swing. Although
it was the content of Abu Zayd’s writings, not their quantity, that had
hindered his appointment, it is not really necessary to examine them
closely. Our concern is not the minute details of the arguments but rather
the public furor aroused by the attempt to read religious texts in
accordance with a modern scholarly approach. We can make do with noting
that Abu Zayd laid out a fresh interpretation of religious texts,
presented, as one scholar observed, in a “most respectable—and
academically unimpeachable—manner.”[4]
But in the battle that followed, his respectful style and meticulous
scholarship were immaterial, nor did it really matter that he himself was
a believer, who repeatedly reaffirmed his adherence to the faith.[5]
What did matter was that Abu Zayd, a product of modern education and
rational thought, dared apply the standard academic yardstick to the Holy
Scriptures, thereby intruding into a territory others regarded as theirs.
Once the issue hit the headlines, the religious circles behind Shahin
could not afford to acquiesce in defeat. They pursued the legal case
further, and in mid-June 1995—some six weeks after Abu Zayd was awarded
his university promotion—they won their victory. Reversing the lower
court’s decision, the Court of Appeals ruled that Abu Zayd was indeed a
murtadd and should therefore be separated from his
wife. The
new ruling stirred a wave of angry protests by Egyptian liberal
intellectuals, as well as calls for the execution of Abu Zayd by radical
Islamists. Abu Zayd received threats to his life, which in Egypt of the
mid-1990s could not be taken lightly. In the summer 1995 he and his wife
decided to leave the country. Abu Zayd accepted a job offer at Leiden
University, the couple settled in Holland, and from there they appealed
the ruling at a higher judicial instance. A year later, in August 1996,
the Egyptian Court of Cassations rejected the appeal and confirmed the
previous decision of apostasy and separation. This court represented the
supreme judicial authority, yet more legal procedures were possible even
after its decision.[6]
The following month, a Cairo Court of Urgent Cases ordered the suspension
of the separation ruling. The
Abu Zayd affair pitted two camps in Egypt—for the time being we may refer
to them as “traditional” and “liberal-rationalist”—against each other in
an angry encounter. The former camp, including Shahin and his students,
viewed the final court’s ruling as a great achievement in their drive to
consolidate the role of religion in Egypt. The court’s position, Shahin
stated, was “a message to society, that the call of secularists and
Marxists is in reality apostasy from Islam…. It means that the era of
secularists and Marxists in over in Egypt.” This victory, he asserted, was
“only the beginning. We will do this to everyone who thinks they are
bigger than Islam.”[7]
Secular-minded intellectuals were shocked and alarmed by the legal
developments. Political parties, the lawyers’ and journalists’ unions, the
Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and other public and academic
bodies held rallies and issued statements expressing their profound dismay
with what had happened. Abu Zayd was described as “one of the most
important thinkers of enlightenment in Egypt’s history and a distinguished
beacon in the annals of Arab culture as a whole.”[8]
The Center for Human Rights—Legal Aid issued a statement saying that the
court’s ruling “would lead the society far from civilization and return
the country to the Dark Ages, where Inquisition Courts inspected the
conscience of intellectuals, researchers and innovators, and where the
values of prejudice and rigidity prevailed.”[9] A
public “Committee for the Support of Abu Zayd” was set up in Egypt; and a
woman-lecturer at the University of Zaqaziq announced her readiness to
become Abu Zayd’s second wife, which, she said, was a “Jihad for
God.”[10]
The liberals expressed their outrage with the Islamist lawyers, who sought
to sow discord in the community, and with the courts that ruled along such
“benighted lines.” They also voiced deep concern regarding the trial’s
impact on the fate of freedom in Egypt and on its cultural future. The
court’s decision, one of Abu Zayd’s lawyers stated, articulating a gloom
shared by many, “extinguished the last hope of living in a society where
free speech is guaranteed. The Egyptian people has been sentenced to life
in darkness.”[11]
There was another striking aspect to the fiery debate. While many of the
participants, on both sides, felt that the case represented a major
milestone in the country’s historic cultural evolution, the government
chose to remain silent. The state authorities voiced no official opinion
nor, so it seemed, did they try to influence the judiciary in any manner.
Instead, they allowed the court to have its say and the public debate to
run its natural course. We
shall return to this affair and its implications, as well as to the
government’s silence. At his point, however, it would be more useful to
expand the scope of exploration and include precedents from the past, thus
placing the story in its appropriate historical
perspective. Abu
Zayd, 1930 Muhammad
Abu Zayd was an obscure shaykh from Damanhur who had received religious
education in local schools and in al-Azhar, then found employment as a
mosque preacher in his hometown. He also occupied himself as a popular
lecturer on Islamic issues, and apparently published several books on
Islamic matters in the 1920s, written strictly in the orthodox
tradition.[13]
In December 1930 he published a commentary on the Qur’an, that exposed him
to the wrath of the religious establishment. The book, entitled
Al-hidaya wal-‘irfan fi tafsir al-Qur’an bil-Qur’an (roughly:
Guidance and Illumination in Proper Qur’an Interpretation) was suppressed
soon after publication and no copies seem to have survived. But a detailed
discussion of its text by a contemporary scholar, who had access to it,
casts much light on the author’s approach and the reasons for the uproar
it engendered.[14]
Abu Zayd employed rationalist criteria in interpreting the miracles
described in the Qur’an, rejecting any explanation that was incompatible
with human reason. To quote an example, he dismissed the notion of the
Prophet’s heavenly journey via Jerusalem, claiming that the Qur’anic
rendition actually refers to his Hijra from Mecca to Madina; “the more
remote mosque” (al-masjid al-aqsa) thus had nothing to do with
Jerusalem, but was in fact the mosque in Madina.[15] Shortly
after the book appeared, Shaykh al-Azhar Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri
noticed certain young shaykhs from his institution distributing it among
the students. He asked to examine the text, was shocked by its contents
and immediately took steps to have it suppressed. The shaykhs who had
distributed it were reassigned to positions as far away as Asyut, and the
police confiscated every copy of the book. A committee of five senior
al-Azhar ‘Ulama’ assessed the book and submitted a lengthy, 75-page
report, which was also published in al-Azhar’s journal.[16]
It discussed many of Abu Zayd’s misconceptions (dalalat) and
falsities (abatil), the kind of which, it stated, “could not have
issued from a mind with [even] a tiny spark of light in it.”[17]
Such a distortion (tahrif) of the Qur’anic account proved that the
author was misguided (ha’ir) and a liar (affak); still
worse, his work was nothing short of heresy (ilhad fil-din) and an
assault (huruj) on Islam. The committee did not seek to punish Abu
Zayd for his “heresy”, stating that “the likes of him are commissioned
[for judgement] before their God.”[18]
But an injunction was issued forbidding him to preach in mosques and to
hold religious meetings. This
did not end Muhammad Abu Zayd’s ordeal. Another champion of orthodoxy,
Muhammad Rashid Rida, who was disappointed with the “mild” Azhar report,
launched a public offensive against him. Rida, the eloquent spokesman of
the Salafiyya, devoted four angry essays in his journal al-Manar
(between June and October 1931) to refuting Abu Zayd’s commentary and
accusing him of apostasy.[19]
To increase the public effect of his assault, he also sent his articles to
the popular daily al-Ahram. What Abu Zayd was after, Rida
disclosed, was merely political gain: as a supporter of the Wafd he sought
to de-legitimize the government, then headed by Isma‘il Sidqi.[20]
To that end, he published a work abounding in unbelief (kufr) and
heresy (ilhad)—the worst deviating exegeses ever written on the
Qur’an. Whoever expressed such views, Rida charged, should be declared an
apostate. He should not be allowed to remain married to his Muslim wife,
to bequeath his property to Muslims or to inherit from them.[21]
Nor was the attack on Abu Zayd just verbal. A group of orthodox shaykhs in
Damanhur resounded the message of his apostasy, and took him to local
court, which ruled that he should be separated from his wife. Abu Zayd
then carried his case to a Cairo Court of Appeals, which decided in his
favor.[22]
After that no more was heard of Muhammad Abu Zayd. He and his story sank
into oblivion. From
the perspective of the 1990s, with a second Abu Zayd affair on record, the
amazingly similar earlier story of a man by the same name is intriguing
and perhaps symbolic. To the contemporaries of Muhammad Abu Zayd, however,
his story was of little import. At least part of the explanation for this
was the occurrence of two comparable affairs around the same time that
were far more prominent and had more profound implications. A glance at
these two famous cases—related to ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq and Taha Husayn—is
instructive for the present discussion. Since they have been dealt with
extensively in the literature it is possible, again, to do with but a
brief reference to their main relevant aspects. Shaykh
‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, a Shar‘i judge from Mansura, published his tract
Al-islam wa-usul al-hukm (Islam and the Foundations of Government)
in 1925. The immediate political context to its appearance was the public
debate on the issue of the Caliphate, which had recently been abolished,
and the aspirations of Egypt’s King Fu’ad in that regard. This, however,
is of no concern to us here. ‘Abd al-Raziq approached the issue of
government in Islam from a basically secular perspective, arguing that it
was actually a political entity with no religious sanction. The guardians
of traditional values were outraged, and he was brought before a Grand
Council of ‘Ulama’. ‘Abd al-Raziq insisted on his right to his views under
the constitution, but to no avail: he was dismissed from his post as a
judge, lost the title ‘alim and was prohibited from serving in any
religious position. The case stirred an outcry, with liberal thinkers
passionately supporting ‘Abd al-Raziq in the name of civil rights
enshrined in the constitution. It also sparked a political crisis that
brought down the cabinet, which, in turn, further enhanced public
involvement in the matter. The furor gradually subsided, and was consigned
to historiography.[23] Taha
Husayn, a graduate of al-Azhar and professor of Arabic literature at Cairo
University, was involved in a similar scandal the following year. In his
book Fi al-shi‘r al-jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry), Husayn employed
modern norms of literary criticism in analyzing ancient poetic pieces. In
this there was an implicit call for a modern reappraisal of time-honored
Qur’an and Sunna interpretation. Alarmed and enraged, the ‘Ulama’
denounced him as a heretic and demanded his expulsion from the university.
Husayn was taken to court for insulting the religion of the state, and
although acquitted he had to leave the country for a while. He then
published a revised edition of the book, leaving out the more provocative
sections (the main message, however, remained). This affair, too, had a
political side that is beyond our concern here, which led to Husayn’s
discharge from the university five years later on the pretext of having
published the book.[24] The
three cases presented above, though distinct from each other in some
important ways, had a significant common facet: they all served to
highlight the historic struggle over Egypt’s cultural identity.
Essentially, it was a battle between two world-views: a conservative view,
that rested on religious belief, subscribed to traditional values and
abhorred innovations; and a liberal-modernist view, which regarded
intellectual openness as the only route leading to a proper place in the
modern world. Within each of these two currents were, obviously, many
sub-currents that advocated a variety of cultural
recipes. The
Historic Challenge to Traditional Values By the
time of the ‘Abd al-Raziq, Husayn and Muhammad Abu Zayd scandals, the
religious authorities were on the defensive and retreating. To their
dismay, the uncontrolled printing of books and newspapers prospered; and
alien ideas were not only discussed, but also informed social and
political norms. With the Ottoman collapse, Egypt’s political leadership
and a considerable segment of its intellectual elite opted for a different
course in response to the call of modernity. The struggle for
independence, the building of new state institutions, defining communal
identity—all were issues that could be tackled, so it seemed, with the
exciting formula of liberal nationalism. Novel concepts, detached from old
conventions, came to inspire the approach to such matters as the structure
and prerogatives of the state, mechanisms for the transfer of power, party
politics, social status and mobility, the nature of public discourse, and
indeed most aspects of public life. Modern-thinking intellectuals, their
ranks expanding, were encouraged by the political leaders’ acceptance of
the new ethos and felt reassured about their new orientation. It also
seemed that the public, or at least its politically aware sector, was
prepared to give this new course a chance. The open debate in post-World
War I Egypt, conducted in books and journals and reflected in literature
and art, revolved largely around modern ideas and options (to the extent
that Egypt, along with Lebanon, blazed the trail for other Arabic-speaking
societies). Advocates of the old order were overwhelmed. With al-Azhar
reluctant to enter the press arena until 1931 (the year of its first
periodical publication), the most effective defenders of tradition
remained Rashid Rida and his colleagues at al-Manar. It was they
who conducted the most vociferous campaign against the “innovators,”
including the three writers discussed above.[28]
Their voice, however, was all but lost in the grand chorus of the
time. The
writings of these three men marked a new sort of threat, graver than
hitherto. They employed their modern tools to invade an area that so far
had been left untouched: the discussion and interpretation of holy texts.
By meddling with, and mishandling the community’s most sacred assets, they
infringed upon the ‘Ulama’s last bastion, thus violating the latter’s
uncontested authority in their own domain. If the previous challenges to
tradition were aggravating and condemnable, this new affront was
unbearable. That the three were al-Azhar graduates (‘Abd al-Raziq and Abu
Zayd were also religious-establishment functionaries) made their attack
all the more painful. This dangerous assault had to be confronted head-on.
It called for the use of the ultimate weapon at the ‘Ulama’’s disposal:
labeling whoever expounds such ideas as mulhid and murtadd,
a measure tantamount to excommunication. Accusations of apostasy and the
use of these damning titles appeared in all three cases. They would
reappear decades later, in the case of Nasr Hamid Abu
Zayd. The
encounters of 1925, 1926 and 1931 were tests of strength between the two
camps. Their results drew the lines of battle between them. Hitherto the
liberals had been making impressive strides forward, while the
traditionalists had been engaged in what seemed to be a rearguard battle
of a retreating power. It was thus only logical to expect the liberal
thinkers to advance their ideas one step further, on the very same trail
they had followed until then. But the ferocious reaction of the
conservatives to this attempt, and their success in stemming the tide,
marked the limits of the liberal momentum. They underscored the nature of
the course Egypt had chosen to pursue in its new era: modernization
alongside—not in lieu of—the old value system. Important ingredients of
the old order had been left in place, and continued to shape the country’s
cultural identity. In this respect Egypt differed markedly from
post-Ottoman Turkey. While the latter, under Atatürk, opted for an
explicitly secular path, deliberately breaking with its Islamic past,
Egypt stopped short of making a comparable move. The roots of this
far-reaching variance go back to the distinct historical development of
the two societies in the nineteenth century (and before)—an exciting
comparison to engage in but one which is beyond the scope of this study.
In following the course that they did, Egyptian leaders of the twentieth
century were not making a new choice. Rather, they were pursuing a
strategy devised, as already noted, by their nineteenth-century
predecessors: bypassing, not attacking, the traditional belief-system as
well as its recognized defenders. The result of this historic choice was
the persistence of tension between the two trends examined here. The
‘Ulama’ retained considerable social influence, and in times of danger
could use it to fend off the danger. The effect of this duality would be
felt throughout the twentieth century. Plight and Shattered Dreams The Cumulative Effect of Disillusionment Egyptian
society underwent significant transformation during the 60 years that
elapsed between the first Abu Zayd affair and the second. The social,
political and economic landscape changed considerably, as did the
society’s responses to the various challenges it faced. Over the years,
Egyptians heard their leaders preach a variety of ideologies in which the
role of faith and tradition differed but, on the whole, was rather
limited.
As the
twentieth century neared its close, Egypt had to contend with the
shattered remains of several great promises from earlier decades. The
first was national liberalism, an appealing notion propagated in the 1920s
that had already lost much of its lure by the mid-1930s. The
national-liberal formula failed to address such major problems as
socioeconomic imbalances, chronic political instability and, above all,
foreign domination. The failure gave rise to other ideological solutions
and spurred a reawakening of public religious sentiments. These were in
part channeled to non-formal, popular organizations—most prominently the
Muslim Brotherhood—that offered their own set of total answers to harsh
realities. But before too long, a very different form of messianic promise
loomed bright and exciting, as Nasserism burst onto the center-stage of
Egyptian politics. Nasser rekindled hope and pride. He presented a grand
ideal of sociopolitical order, communal identity and international stature
that promised a future far better and greater than the past. In this
essentially secular vision, the traditional spiritual leadership became
irrelevant. To ensure this irrelevancy, and appropriate whatever popular
authority the ‘Ulama’ still possessed, Nasser abolished the religious
court system in 1955 and ordered a reform in al-Azhar in 1961 that
effectively subordinated the old institution to the state.[29]
“The shaykhs,” one scholar noted, had “become completely isolated from the
modernizing segment of society and their traditional views [were] almost
totally rejected…. Even their interpretations of Islam [had] been rejected
in favor of those offered by secular theorists.”[30] The
potency of the Nasserite dream and the popular aspirations it generated
were far more impressive than those aroused by liberal-nationalism. From
the perspective of Nasser’s heyday, in the late-1950s, Egypt’s shift from
traditionalism to secularism appeared to be an irreversible historic
process. The country seemed to be moving along a clear and linear course,
begun back in the nineteenth century, in which the setbacks of the 1930s
and 1940s now appeared as no more than ephemeral intervals. Outside
observers subscribed to this view. The process of abandoning the Shari‘a
and borrowing foreign codes—Albert Hourani assessed in 1961—was moving
ahead “with astonishing speed,” and was now “almost complete.”[31]
Manfred Halpern, in a highly acclaimed study, similarly spoke of “the
triumph of secular leadership” and the “shattering of the glass” of the
old order. “A system connecting man, God and society is falling apart,” he
observed, and those parts of the traditional system that still existed had
“lost their essential links, and thus their relevance and
effectiveness.”[32] But
then again came a turn of the tide, several years later, as the Nasserist
dream itself was in tatters. By the time Nasser left the stage in 1970,
the country was in deep crisis—its army beaten, its economy in trouble,
its regional standing at a low ebb, its soil still under enemy occupation.
To add insult to injury, foreign presence, now in the form of an army of
Soviet experts, technicians and military men had returned to the country.
As Nasserism collapsed it left in its wake a community of disillusioned
believers groping for a compass. Another
layer was added to this burden of unfulfilled hopes during Anwar
al-Sadat’s presidency. Sadat, though a man of impressive creativity and
vision, did not offer a new creed to replace that of his predecessor.
Instead, he authored a set of hope-inspiring policies and ideas (some
would say, illusions): war—with the thrill of “The Crossing”—and peace,
economic openness and political liberalization, Egyptianness (to replace
pan-Arabism) and international reorientation. These succeeded each other
with dazzling speed, as if to compensate for their short-lived aura. But
each of these policies came with a price tag, and the costs accumulated:
social dislocation and alienation of the educated elite, increased
economic disparities, embarrassing regional and global partnerships, the
loss of international allies. While the promised rewards were slow to
materialize, the price was immediately and plainly evident. There was
another important aspect to Sadat’s policy. More orthodox than Nasser and
politically suspicious of the Nasserite left, Sadat gave prominence to
religion in the patchy scheme he sketched for his country. He made
extensive use of the religious establishment to legitimize his policies;
allowed the constitution to be modified so as to define the Shari‘a
“the major source” of legislation; and reversed the trend of
de-legitimizing popular Islamic organizations, permitting them to regain
political influence instead. This last move proved fateful. By leaving
serious problems unresolved, forging an eclectic ethos, and at the same
time permitting the reemergence of the religious alternative, Sadat
facilitated the revival of the struggle between the two historic trends.
He effectively created the conditions that invited the new exponents of
the religious option to challenge his own leadership. Some of them
preached revolutionary ideas and violent means to attain the goal of a
Shari‘a state. When the government firmly confronted them, this was taken
as additional proof of its animosity toward popular religious sentiment,
and no effort to refute this image was of any avail. Sadat fell victim to
the jinni he had released from the bottle, but he was not the only one to
pay the price. As he departed from the scene, he left an Egyptian society
exhausted from the intense experience of his tenure and the violence that
ended it, with its elite as disoriented as ever. Egypt now was “a jaded
country that [had] known many false starts and faded dawns,” in the words
of one observer.[33] Mubarak:
The Pragmatic Vision
By the
time Husni Mubarak came to power in 1981, Egypt was a very different
country from that of the 1920s. The community was much bigger now: with 44
million in 1981 its population was more than three times its size in the
mid-1920s.[34]
It was also more urbanized: Greater Cairo, with some 8% of the population
in 1930, had become home to every fourth Egyptian half a century
later.[35]
In addition, the society was more educated: general illiteracy, as high as
92% in 1917 and 82% two decades later, had dropped to around 50% by the
time Mubarak became president and continued to decline
subsequently.[36]
This, of course, meant not only that a bigger part of the society could
read, but also that the absolute number of people with education—and hence
with a potential for active public involvement—was immeasurably greater.
Another significant difference between the two periods was in access to
the media. The Egyptian written media were remarkably variegated both in
the 1920s and in the 1990s; but toward the end of the century those
exposed to them were much more numerous. More important, the broadcast
media, nonexistent in the 1920s, had spread almost universally in Egypt,
with the effect that even those who did not feel involved were at least
kept informed. One result of these changes was that public debates now
involved many more participants. Another was that the public arena had
become more diffuse and multi-polar than during the first third of the
century. This last development was apparent not only in the
liberal-secularist wing of the public arena, but also amongst its
religious rivals, who espoused various Islamic solutions to the society’s
ills. Alongside the established ‘Ulama’, backed by a few orthodox
publicists, there was now a whole array of politicized popular movements
and assertive organizations advocating diverse Islamist strategies. This
proliferation of trends, along with the growth of involved constituencies,
produced highly motivated and widely supported combatants at the frontline
of the cultural battle.
Mubarak
inherited a relatively open political system, in which forces with
conflicting outlooks enjoyed freedom of expression, and to a certain
degree organizational freedom as well. These included the formerly
discredited and now-tolerated trend of religious activism, whose role in
shaping the public agenda was on the ascendancy. The more extreme and less
tolerated wing of that trend was also becoming more assertive, a process
that culminated in the assassination of Sadat. Political violence would
become a permanent feature of Egyptian public life, wasting precious
national resources and forcing the government to rearrange its priorities.
In the background were more problems: material plight, social and
inter-communal tensions, and a widespread lingering sense of frustration
with Egypt’s marginal place in the modern world—that elusive motivation in
the behavior of communities that is palpably so potent yet impossible to
gauge. These troubles were bequeathed to Mubarak who had no clear program
for addressing them, but only a vague set of ideas, some experimental,
others quite controversial. Mubarak’s own public image at the time of his
accession, following a few short years of exposure in a civilian post, was
of a gifted but unpretentious administrator rather than a visionary
leader. But the absence of a comprehensive ideology, or ideologue, was not
regarded as a disadvantage at first. On the contrary, following many years
of overly politicized public life, Egypt seemed to be yearning for some
respite and welcomed the new president’s low-key
style. In a
country with such an old and revered legacy of centralized government, the
policies and style of the ruler bear special importance. They are
scrutinized closely by the people who, in turn, are influenced by his
behavior. Highly sensitive to this truth, Mubarak did not purport to
reshape the country’s values through a revolutionary process, nor foster
undue optimism where circumstances did not warrant it. A pragmatic and
straightforward man, he made it a point right from the start to discuss
the difficult reality candidly. He preached sweat and patience. “If I were
to listen to some nervous people,” he told an interviewer early on in his
presidency, “Egypt would go to hell. They say: ‘change, change!’ and then
what? You run and run and then the troubles begin.”[37]
Instead he sought long-term treatment for the national problems, rejecting
demands, domestic and international, for drastic measures. With this
sensible approach Mubarak’s government registered significant
achievements. The domestic front, which on the eve of his tenure had
reached boiling point, was cooled down and recovered a measure of
stability. Multi-party politics, previously a shaky experiment, was
consolidated and expanded, new opposition parties were licensed and
freedom of expression was increased. The government charted a systematic
plan to tackle the economic malaise, which it applied in the 1980s, to be
followed by more ambitious structural reform in the 1990s. The
infrastructure of public services, responsible for the quality of daily
life, was rehabilitated and improved considerably, as any visitor to the
country could sense. On the foreign front, too, Mubarak’s compromising
approach helped in bailing Egypt out of a difficult corner in the regional
and global arenas and moving it to a more comfortable middle position. All
of these accomplishments were not lost on the Egyptians, and it was clear
that they were thankful to their president for them. But—and
this was a major distinction between Husni Mubarak and his two
predecessors—Mubarak was careful not to talk of a “great promise”, or
present his government’s achievements as part of a master-plan leading to
Egyptian glory. Such a strategy would scarcely be consonant with his
personal style. Where Sadat, somewhat wishfully, promised upcoming
economic prosperity and an imminent “reaping [of] the fruits of the past
period of suffering,”[38]
Mubarak spoke soberly of the hardships lying ahead, despite the experts’
responsible planning. “I am not Samson,” he stated. “We do our best. As
long as we are on the right track and working…that is the maximum we can
do.”[39]
As part of his down-to-earth economic outlook, he urged the people to eat
less meat and make do with vegetables “as they do in Japan,”[40]
and scolded them for eating tomatoes and cucumbers out of the summer
season “like aristocrats.”[41]
In the same vein, where Sadat boasted of having introduced “true
democracy,” and festively announced that Egypt had “gone over and above
90—and even 99—percent in democracy,”[42]
Mubarak chose to speak simply of “providing dosages of democracy in
proportion to our ability to absorb them. We are forging ahead,” he
stated, “but we need time for our democracy to develop fully.”[43]
Similarly, in foreign policy Mubarak avoided dramatic initiatives that
would fire the imagination of the public at home and spawn great hopes.
Unlike Nasser and Sadat, he adhered instead to a temperate dialogue with
Egypt’s interlocutors. In all of these areas he represented a model of a
circumspect planner and pragmatic politician rather than a visionary.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel itself is long and
crooked, was his message. The train, however, must move ahead while the
driver does his best. Can a
country with problems as formidable as Egypt’s be led without a promise
for a foreseeable future better than the present? That Mubarak has been in
power longer than any Egyptian ruler in the twentieth century, and that he
has such an impressive record of achievement, would seem to answer the
question in the affirmative. Yet, if the absence of a dramatic vision has
not jeopardized Mubarak’s leadership, it has been largely responsible for
perpetuating the malaise felt by so many Egyptians. It has made the
distress of the economically deprived, those badly in need of a visible
light at the end of the tunnel, all the more difficult to bear. And it has
allowed the irritating discontent with Egypt’s realities felt by many
others to linger on: discontent with the gap between today’s disheartening
spectacle and yesterday’s magnificence—whose remains, Pharaonic or
medieval-Islamic, are to be seen all over; and with the dissonance between
where Egypt is and where it aspires to be among the modern nations. “At
the heart of Egyptian life there lies a terrible sense of disappointment,”
Fouad Ajami has noted. “The pride of modern Egypt has been far greater
than its achievements. For all the graces of this land and for all the
long struggle of its modernizers, the gap between Egypt’s sense of itself
and its performance is impossible to ignore.”[44]
Mubarak’s attainments have been duly acknowledged. But the sense of
disenchantment has sent many Egyptians to look for an uplifting vision
elsewhere.
Back to the
Fray Religiosity Reasserted Relying
on the traditional belief-system as a remedy for society’s modern ills was
never completely abandoned, as we have seen. Even in the heyday of
national-liberalism and Nasserism, it remained within the range of
available options, advocated by a core of faithful adherents who would not
trade it for any substitute. This circle of disciples expanded in times of
disillusionment with the alternative ways. In the late 1970s, as President
Sadat loosened the state’s grip on the religious trend, the Islamists
thrived rapidly in many forms, commonly (and somewhat whimsically)
classified by their modus operandi as “radical” or “moderate”.
Though self-styled as al-ra’is al-mu’min (“the believing
president”), Sadat failed to ward off the assaults of his religious foes.
His failure to formulate a clear and inspiring plan for the country
resulted in a growing number of people falling back on the traditional
option, as an alternative—not a complement—to the inconsistent path he
delineated. Paying the ultimate price for his policies, Sadat left his
successor a tangled arena, with the impatient advocates of a Shari‘a state
as the regime’s arch-rivals, and clearly on the ascent. Mubarak’s strategy
of calling for realism and patience ensured that the tension would not be
quickly relieved.
To
most observers of the Egyptian scene, a major item on the country’s public
agenda during the last quarter of the twentieth century—some would argue,
the major item—has been the state’s contention with the phenomenon
known as the Islamist or fundamentalist challenge. Viewed against the
backdrop of historic developments, this struggle may be more broadly
considered as yet another round of the public battle over cultural
orientation. In this recent, passionate phase, the tradition-oriented
forces no longer seem to be on the retreat as they had appeared four or
five decades ago. Rather, they are waging an audacious offensive against
the state—which meets them with its own practical vision and with the
awesome might of its repressive machinery; and against the secularized
segments of society—which adhere to a somewhat lackluster rationalistic
ideological alternative that is nonviolent by definition. The state of the
battlefield is far from clear: both sides claim to be on the defensive and
readily produce evidence to substantiate the claim. The traditionalists
maintain they are fighting to fend off the decades-old secular onslaught
that has already invaded much of their precious territory.
Liberal-secularists, for their part, combat to check the alarming spread
of ideas they view as a menace to modern order and progress, the “campaign
to stifle freedom of thought and expression in the country.”[45] Most
dramatic of the many faces of this encounter has been the violent
dimension. Beyond the spectacular assassination of a president, it has
involved Egypt’s basically nonviolent society in a cycle of ferocious
outbursts and brutal countermeasures. Bloody confrontations have taken
place since the late 1970s, in recurrent waves that have gradually become
costlier and more widespread. The wave that peaked from 1992–95 resulted
in more than 1,000 dead and an even higher number of wounded, including
Islamist radicals, members of the security forces, civilians and tourists.
The devastation of property and loss of resources were likewise awesome.
Among the victims were writer and journalist Faraj Fuda, an intrepid
critic of religious extremism, who was assassinated in June 1992, and the
liberal author and Nobel Prize laureate Najib Mahfuz, who was assaulted
and injured in October 1994. There were also attempts on the lives of
President Mubarak and several ministers and ex-ministers. The Nasr Hamid
Abu Zayd affair, too, had its brutal aspect, as radical groups announced
their intention to “execute” him for his apostasy.[46] But
the violent expression of the phenomenon, however dramatic, may not be its
most important facet. Perhaps more significant in the long run is the
political aspect, which has far-reaching ramifications for the cultural
scene. In a political arena more active than ever, exponents of
tradition—institutionalized ‘Ulama’, Muslim Brotherhood activists,
Islamist thinkers, and other publicists with similar proclivities—lock
horns with modern-secularists, statesmen and intellectuals, who reject
conservative religiosity as the sole cultural basis for Egypt. Beyond the
ideological debate it is a battle for positions of power. It takes
different forms and is held on different fronts: a contest for party and
parliamentary representation, a quest for control of civil society bodies
(conspicuously the leading professional syndicates), a race for providing
social and cultural services to the public to win popularity, and a
propaganda war over popular legitimacy. The arenas of contest are equally
diverse: the People’s Assembly (Egypt’s parliament), academic fora,
printed and broadcast media, books and pamphlets, street posters and
graffiti, and—since the early 1990s—the courts. The struggle has an impact
on every sphere of public life, from dress codes to Muslim-Coptic
relations, from freedom of art to choosing Egypt’s foreign allies. No
class of society, no group or organization can escape its influence in one
way or another. The
remainder of this paper will focus on what appear to be some of the major
characteristics of this struggle in its current phase. The Growing Assertiveness of the Religious Establishment Like
Shar‘i law itself, Egypt’s official religious institutions were not
dislodged in the process of modernization. Rather, they were paralleled by
new systems, as we have seen. The ‘Ulama’ were weakened economically and
politically, but not expunged as a spiritual authority. Those in
government did not seek to contest this authority, both out of veneration
for tradition and because the political crippling of the ‘Ulama’ rendered
such a clash unnecessary. They therefore tried only to ensure that this
authority did not stand in their way. Such a strategy was advocated from
the early nineteenth century on to the mid-twentieth. The “Free Officers”,
however, brought with them a different approach. In this profoundly
traditional society, their seizure of power by force created a problem of
public legitimacy. To address it, they “nationalized” the functions of the
religious leadership by imposing their control on its members and
institutions, subjugating al-Azhar to their domination. They then utilized
the subjacent religious establishment to consolidate their public standing
by eliciting its backing for their policies. During Nasser’s period and
most of that of Sadat, the relationship between state and ‘Ulama’ was
clear and simple: the government exploited the ‘Ulama’ as a legitimizing
ornament while allowing them little autonomy in areas with social or
political implications. Consequently, the latter, and al-Azhar institution
in particular, underwent a phase of retrogression in their public
standing. Here and there they showed signs of assertiveness; noticeable
instances were al-Azhar’s move to prohibit the publication of Najib
Mahfuz’s novel Awlad haritna (Children of our Neighborhood) in
1959, and a fatwa (religious ruling) in 1965, prohibiting marriage
between Muslim women and communists.[47]
On the whole, however, this was an era of docility for the religious
establishment.[48]
The
rise of non-institutionalized Islamic movements in the later years of
Sadat’s tenure produced a change in this relationship. Under the new
circumstances, the regime needed the ‘Ulama’’s backing not just as an
ornament but, more practically now, as a weapon in the battle against the
radicals. Establishment ‘Ulama’, too, felt threatened by the competing
propagators of Islam who openly defied their authority. The militant
challenge to both brought state and ‘Ulama’ closer together with a common
interest. New tasks were assigned to the religious establishment: to
counter the message of the extremists with a moderate message of their
own; to de-legitimize the militants in the public’s eye; and to sanction
measures endorsed by the state in its conflict with the radicals,
including harsh suppression. Other developments required the endorsement
of the ‘Ulama’, on issues over which the government faced domestic
criticism, such as making peace with Israel. Much of this change took
place during Mubarak’s presidency. With a general strategy that inspired
little public enthusiasm, the government needed the effective tool of an
authoritative religious cadre better equipped than itself to contend with
the appeal of the radicals. Following Sadat’s assassination, leading
religious scholars were called upon to conduct televised dialogues with
spokesmen of radical Islamic groups, and to propound a moderate Islamic
message in markedly expanded religious programs on the broadcast media.
They were also expected—and often obliged—to provide Shar‘i license to
government actions. Thus, for example, both Shaykh al-Azhar and the Grand
Mufti responded to Mubarak’s request and issued fatwas affirming
that family planning was compatible with Islamic values—a matter of utmost
importance to Mubarak.[49]
Such government reliance on the ‘Ulama’ was bound to lead, in turn, to the
latter’s greater public prominence and, consequently, to their
assertiveness. To be sure, assertiveness did not necessarily imply
organizational and political autonomy: the formal status of the religious
establishment in the state remained basically unchanged. But in the open
debate on the society’s cultural future, its voice was now heard louder
and clearer. One
area in which institutionalized ‘Ulama’ expanded their activity was
censorship of publications and artwork. In 1990, al-Azhar’s Islamic
Research Council found a book by ‘Ala’ Hamid, Masafa fi ‘aql rajul
(A Tract in a Man’s Mind) to contain heretical ideas. The book was
banned and Hamid was prosecuted for blasphemy and sentenced to eight years
in prison.[50]
The following year, during the annual book fair, the ‘Ulama’ banned
several books by Muhammad Sa‘id al-‘Ashmawi, Chief Justice of the High
Court of Appeals and a courageous protagonist of liberal values. It took
the intercession of President Mubarak himself to restore them to the
vendors. Increasingly the atmosphere was becoming more comfortable for
interventions by al-Azhar. An incident in late 1993 highlighted the
turning of the tide in favor of the religious establishment. During a
session of the People’s Assembly, an Islamist member criticized Minister
of Culture Faruq Husni for allowing the reproduction, in a recent ministry
publication, of Gustave Klimt’s painting of a naked Adam and Eve.
Dismissing the charge, Husni defended the artistic value of the piece; but
in the same breath he explicitly acknowledged the right of al-Azhar, as
the guardian of moral values, to review (and ban) ministry
publications.[51]
Before long, this statement by a government minister was given judicial
sanction. On 10 February 1994, the State Council (majlis
al-dawla)—the body overseeing the constitutionality of laws and their
consonance with the Shari‘a—recognized al-Azhar’s exclusive authority to
review and censor all written, audio or audiovisual works published in the
country and dealing with Islamic subjects. What the category of “Islamic
subjects” comprised was for al-Azhar to decide.[52]
This was, no doubt, a decision of major import that signified a
far-reaching concession by the state to the religious establishment. The
government granted the ‘Ulama’ an authority they had long been demanding
but had hitherto failed to obtain. Al-Azhar
was quick to capitalize on its new privilege. Within a couple of weeks
after the Council’s ruling, it issued a ban on the dissemination of books
by Justice ‘Ashmawi (whom an al-Azhar spokesman labeled “another Salman
Rushdie”).[53] A
spate of book suppressions followed. By the summer of 1997, the number of
titles recommended by the religious authorities for purging had reportedly
reached 196. One prominent case was that of Sayyid al-Qimani, a liberal
author and vocal secularist, whose book Rabb al-Zaman (God of [Our]
Time) was marked for banning by the ‘Ulama’, who also sued him for his
views.[54]
Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy (majma‘ al-buhuth al-islamiyya)
became a screen for everything published. It now had the authority to
examine manuscripts (as well as movie and TV scripts) and recommend their
publication, or suppression—decisions of the latter type were implemented
by the Artistic Production Censorship Police.[55]
This mighty prerogative, and the prominence given the ‘Ulama’ in the
media, lent them considerable power to hinder the circulation of ideas
with which they disagreed. The government, for its part, obliged and
cooperated. In one distinct case, Minister of Higher Education Mufid
Shihab ordered that the French scholar Maxime Rodinson’s book
Muhammad be removed from the curriculum of the American University
in Cairo. Available in Egypt since its publication in the late 1960s, the
book was now found to be “blasphemous” and insulting to Islam.[56]
That the state recognized this prerogative further encouraged the ‘Ulama’
to air their views with growing boldness in the cultural debate. In an
interview in the popular weekly al-Musawwar, when asked about the
196 books rejected by al-Azhar, the Research Academy’s secretary dismissed
the question: “So what if it were 196,000—they do not follow our Islamic
path…. We protect the earth from their contamination and the state from
their terror.”[57] Combative
censorship was one sign of the ‘Ulama’’s emboldened stature. Another was
their growing rigidity in the public debate with the critics of tradition.
The diversion of part of the cultural struggle to the courts, where
religious reasoning was often admissible, gave the recognized spiritual
leaders a potent leverage. They willingly offered their opinion to judges
who chose to rule in the spirit of the Shari‘a. This kind of opinion
carried considerably more moral weight than any other kind of professional
assessment the court may have elicited from secular experts; it had, one
seasoned lawyer has observed, “a de facto legislation power.”[58]
Non-establishment Islamist thinkers also influenced the courts by publicly
discussing issues that were sub judice.[59]
Not at all times did the judiciary accept the conservative opinion. When
the veteran Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali, testifying in the trial of Faraj
Fuda’s assassins, suggested that Fuda had been a murtadd and hence
should have been killed, he was overruled by the court.[60]
But even when the court rejected traditionalist legal opinions, this did
not diminish their public impact. Aired with much authority, these views
had the dangerous potential of inspiring the radical Islamist groups and
providing justification for their violent actions. Again the Fuda case is
an illustrative example. A group of prominent al-Azhar ‘Ulama’, who in
early 1992 organized in order “to repel secularist attacks on Islam,”
issued a statement depicting Fuda as “secularist to the bone,” a man who
had “devoted all his efforts and his life to obstructing the application
of the Shari‘a.”[61]
The message and its style were familiar; they actually echoed a statement
by none other than Shaykh al-Azhar, Jadd al-Haqq, who in a public letter
in 1988 denounced secularist writers as enemies of Islam in the service of
foreign interests and labeled them unbelievers.[62]
The ‘Ulama’’s announcement of 1992, however, had a more lethal result.
Fuda was murdered five days after its publication, and his killers
testified that they had taken their cue from the authoritative exponents
of Islamic values: “Yes, we killed him” al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya reportedly
stated, “al-Azhar issued the sentence and we carried out the
execution.”[63] By the
second half of the 1990s, institutionalized ‘Ulama’ had become involved in
the hazardous practice of takfir and irtidad—declaring a
person an apostate and exposing him to the applicable punishment. Such
accusations, formerly voiced primarily by radical Islamic groups, have
more recently been pronounced by individual religious thinkers such as
Ghazali, as we have seen. The number of those resorting to such measures
was steadily growing, and the court decision in the Abu Zayd case, in 1995
and 1996, further encouraged the phenomenon. Takfir became a
subject of public debate, and while this did not make the idea any more
popular it became a frequently-used weapon in the arsenal available to the
traditionalists. In May 1997 it was again employed, this time against
Cairo University philosophy professor Hasan Hanafi. The attack was
launched by the Front of al-Azhar ‘Ulama’ (jabhat ‘ulama’
al-azhar), a non-official grouping of some 2,000 institution members,
including several of its most eminent scholars. Front secretary Dr. Yahya
Isma‘il Hablush condemned Hanafi for things he had written a decade
earlier, which Hablush described as “a destructive assault” on Islam. Such
words, he charged, exposed the author as an atheist, so “the entire
community should mobilize against him.” Hablush appealed to the university
to dismiss Hanafi and urged the judiciary to bring him to trial. Again, a
public clamor followed, with Hablush censured not only by liberal writers
but also by other al-Azhar members, including Shaykh Muhammad al-Sayyid
Tantawi, Shaykh al-Azhar.[64]
Such condemnation of the takfir practice notwithstanding, its
recurrent use, especially by senior ‘Ulama’, had the cumulative effect of
amplifying the Islamist assault on secularism. “When this ‘front’ issues a
fatwa of takfir against a person, it does not seek to
persuade the government or the judiciary,” Nasr Abu Zayd suggested from
his place of exile following the attack on Hanafi. “Rather, it tries to
convince the street. Moreover, the call is necessarily directed to those
capable of killing.” Hence, the authorities were unable, in effect, to
defend free thought from the charge of takfir.[65]
In the late 1990s, at least some members of the religious establishment
felt that the country’s cultural divergence warranted the use of this
extreme device. The
assertive role of the ‘Ulama’ has had profound repercussions. Instead of
serving as a force of moderation, their activities have actually
exacerbated the tension between the secularist and traditionalist trends.
Unable, or unwilling, to shoulder the task of confronting the radicals
with an intelligible formula of modernized Islam, ‘Ulama’ have adhered to
standard conservative interpretations of the faith. Having to compete with
the radicals for Islamic leadership, they have tended to display a rigid
stance by employing tough measures such as book banning and takfir.
Whether intentionally or not, they have equated secularism with
unbelief,[66]
and have labeled both as apostasy. Their rigidity has provoked criticism
from some of their more temperate colleagues, who have resented this
offensive style; but the latter have been only partly successful in
silencing their more contentious peers. For, as the spokesmen of hard-line
religiosity know all too well, the main battlefield is the street—where a
simplistic, black-and-white approach purportedly based on ancestral
tradition is the most comprehensible and hence most effective. This, in
turn, has inevitably led to growing antagonism among secularists,
increasing mutual intolerance and undermining the quest for a consensual
formula of cultural orientation. The Problematic Counter-Attack of Liberal Secularists “Liberal”
is an intricate term. People with a very broad range of beliefs lay claim
to “liberalism,” and few profess to be otherwise. A liberal world-view is
normally associated with flexibility of thought, advocacy of human freedom
and openness to innovation. It is also consonant with a secular view,
which accords to human reason a central role in managing worldly affairs,
and seeks novel solutions to modern needs. To be sure, this does not
preclude personal religious belief; there is no necessary contradiction
between religious faith and a liberal-secular approach to daily realities.
Both “liberal” and “secular” are, of course, relative terms, and their
applicability is determined by degree. Consequently, the distinction
between those to whom these adjectives may aptly be ascribed and others is
frequently blurred.
Nor is
the case any less intricate in the Egyptian context. Here, too, “liberal”
is a title readily assumed by people representing different perspectives;
and “secular”, as we have seen, is often confused with unbelief. In the
present discussion, “secular” denotes those who aspire to a sociopolitical
and cultural order based on human reason and freedom of thought, but
without turning their backs on their religion, at least as a component of
their culture. Those who regard the old spiritual-religious heritage as
entirely irrelevant are few in Egypt. Most secularists do think of Islam,
the faith and the tradition, as an important pillar of their society’s
belief-system and moral code. They believe, however, that this heritage
should play only a limited role in guiding the individual and society in
the modern world, alongside other cultural products of human ingenuity.
Those who air such views regard themselves as continuing the line of
modern thinkers begun in the nineteenth century, most eminently Rifa‘a
Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Taha Husayn,
‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, Muhammad Husayn Haykal and, more recently, Najib
Mahfuz and Faraj Fuda. These were creative writers who contributed to
their society’s enlightenment—tanwir – the corridor leading to the
grand hall of modernity. In
present-day Egypt, this trend comprises mostly authors, journalists,
academics and artists, who actively participate in the public debate. The
recent religious-traditionalist offensive aroused their anxiety and
prompted a liberal counteroffensive aimed at stemming what they regard as
a regressive tide. New liberal forums and institutions have been set up,
among them the Egyptian Society for Human Rights (al-munazzama
al-misriyya li-huquq al-insan), founded in 1985 at the initiative of a
group of intellectuals, among them Faraj Fuda; the Egyptian Enlightenment
Society (al-jam‘iyya al-misriyya lil-tanwir), in whose foundation
in 1987 Fuda also took part; the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development
Studies (markaz ibn khaldun lil-dirasat al-inma’iyya), founded the
following year by the energetic sociology professor Sa‘d al-Din Ibrahim
and several colleagues; the Egyptian Committee for the Defense of National
Unity (al-lajna al-misriyya lil-difa‘ ‘an al-wahda al-wataniyya),
founded in 1990; the Modern Call Society (jam‘iyyat al-nida’
al-jadid), set up in 1992, with economics professor Sa‘id al-Najjar as
president; and the Center for Human Rights— Legal Aid (markaz
al-musa‘ada al-qanuniyya li-huquq al-insan), founded in 1994 by Hisham
Mubarak.[67]
These and other liberal NGOs issue publications and declarations, organize
symposia and file legal suits, and their members participate vigorously in
the verbal exchanges with the traditionalists. It has been a persistent,
robust activity. The more sophisticated and daring—Faraj Fuda, Nasr Abu
Zayd and Sayyid al-Qimani are obvious examples—have also ventured into
reinterpretation of Islamic tradition, rejecting its conservative reading
and offering a fresh one instead. Such creative intellectuals, Qimani has
observed, have displayed unprecedented courage, for their work has been
“written under the threat of excommunication and takfir, which
shows that they approach their task with supreme
sacrifice.” [68] There
is no need here to delve into the details of the liberal
arguments.[69]
Very generally, they see in the Islamist drive and its underlying dogmatic
approach an obscurantist menace to Egypt’s culture, dissociating society
from the rest of the world, from universal humanist values and from
modernity. In a sense, they have an easier task today than did their
nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century forebears: they need to
break no new ground, and can rely on a solid constituency of followers who
are accustomed to thinking in like terms, a constituency that has evolved
over the years thanks to education and the modern media. In another sense,
however, the liberals are at a disadvantage compared to earlier
generations, as they suffer from some serious handicaps in their battle
against the countercurrent. One such liability, already noted and worth
reiterating, is the historical backdrop of repeated liberal failures
against which they preach their case. The fact that past alternatives to
tradition—especially national liberalism in the 1920s and Nasserism in the
1950s—had kindled so much hope, which had been so abysmally frustrated,
considerably weakens the appeal of the liberal message. These earlier
failures also serve as effective ammunition in the hands of the
traditionalists who seek to fend off the secularist
danger. There
are other drawbacks. The message of the liberals is not always clear-cut,
nor is it easy to grasp. As against the straightforward call for obedience
to a religious authority, and the might of simplistic religious slogans,
the liberal call is complex and requires sophistication. Its complexity
derives from this trend’s historic choice not to sever itself entirely
from tradition but rather to adjust it to the needs of the time. The
result is a premise based on a problematic hybrid of faith and reason. It
takes some intellectual maneuvering to see that secularism is not quite
the same as irreligion—that one may approach worldly matters in a
rationalist way without abandoning one’s piety and faith in God—and to
realize that such secularism does not deny the essence of Islam. Take, for
instance, the statement by the liberal thinker and important poet ‘Abd
al-Mu‘ti al-Hijazi, who has suggested that a Muslim may defend his
secularist world-view “not merely by its indispensability for progress,
democracy, freedom of thought and reason, and the assimilation of the
culture of the age, but also by its compatibility with the essence of
Islam, which glorifies human life, rejects priesthood, encourages
ijtihad and makes the public interest the guiding principle of
investigation and choice.”[70] A
reasonable argument, no doubt, but hardly simple. Grasping it would
require multi-layered thinking. Even some of its vocabulary is, as Bernard
Lewis has observed, “recognizably alien. An Arabic loanword like
dimuqratiyya lacks the resonance of shari‘a.”[71]
Such and similar arguments may carry weight with the more cultivated
segment of society; but they are difficult, and often less than
intelligible for the less educated. To the latter, the uncomplicated ideas
of the traditionalists readily make more sense. Moreover, liberals
themselves sometimes find it difficult to define the nature of the
relationship between the principles of modernity and tradition. One
indicator of this difficulty, Nasr Abu Zayd has suggested, is the duality
(izdiwajiyya) between the liberals’ thought on the one hand and
their daily conduct on the other—for example, in matters concerning the
family, or the status of women.[72]
The uncertainty of the liberal message is accentuated by the contrasting
simplicity of the conservative call, “Islam is the Solution!”—al-islam
huwa al-hal—the solution to all the frustrations borne by the misdeeds
of a modernizing leadership. Yet
another disadvantage to the liberal effort is a communication handicap.
The main vehicles for disseminating their views are print media—periodical
publications and books—and to a lesser extent the broadcast media, along
with various art forms, primarily movies. Egypt’s print industry has been
a field of unmatched productivity during the last quarter of the century,
as well as a battlefield for encounters between different orientations.
The traditionalists, like the liberals, issue an impressive range of
publications (especially striking if we recall their leaders’ objection to
printing until the twentieth century), and articulate their views in the
non-religious press as well, although not in movies. Printed matter,
however, is accessible only to those who can read (roughly half of the
population, and most recently a bit more) and to those who care, or can
afford to buy copies (a considerably smaller proportion). Movies, too, are
confined to certain social strata, especially the urban middle class. In
the broadcast media, it is debatable which of the two trends, liberal or
traditionalist, exercises a greater measure of influence. Liberal writers
have repeatedly complained that the conservatives have a double advantage
here: direct—in the easy access offered to their spokesmen in interviews,
talk shows and broadcast sermons; and indirect—in that the government
succumbs to their pressures and adapts media programming to their demands,
primarily by censoring “immoral” shows. More significant, the
traditionalists reach large constituencies via the mosque pulpits, still a
major channel of communication in Egypt. The popular impact of various
media is, of course, a matter for another study. Yet, one has the strong
impression that on this front, too, the liberals are still fighting an
uphill battle, not least because of the undeniable utility of old modes of
communication. One need only recall the effective use ‘Abd al-Sabur Shahin
made of the pulpit to proclaim Abu Zayd’s apostasy, to appreciate the
might of this traditional medium. Until
his death in June 1992, Faraj Fuda was a leading spokesman of the liberal
cause—clear, consistent, intrepid. Without being too shallow, his call was
markedly accessible to the educated public, not a common trait in liberal
articulations. Fuda was also intensively involved in public activity,
political and otherwise, and in that too he was outstanding among his
colleagues. It was probably no accident, and certainly symbolic, that
radicals singled him out as a target. Other figures, such as Abu Zayd
(whose scholarship was depicted as “virtually impenetrable”)[73]
and Justice ‘Ashmawi, have had their adherents, but their popular impact
has been very limited. Fuda has yet to be replaced by a comparably gifted
liberal, who could transmit a popularized version of the complicated
liberal philosophy to counter the simplistic formula of “Islam is the
Solution!” Courtrooms as a Battleground Perhaps
more surprisingly, the secularists have been successfully challenged and
demoralized by their traditionalist rivals in what could have been
expected to be their own home ground—the ostensibly secular judicial
system. The second Abu Zayd affair was characteristic of the recent phase
of the cultural struggle in that it was played out in the courts. The
regular resort to the judiciary to fight secularist thought is a novelty.
Religious activists have experimented with it, and once proven useful they
have continued to exploit this option with ever-growing
alacrity.
Prior
to the 1990s, there were only a few precedents in which the courts were
approached to such ends. The case of Muhammad Abu Zayd in 1931 was one of
them, and over the years there were a handful of others.[74]
Courtrooms were not seen as a natural arena for this contention, still
less so after the incorporation of Shar‘i courts in the civil judicial
system, in the mid-1950s. With this last measure, the judiciary in its
entirety came under the control of a regime subscribing to a secular
philosophy. Yet, religious law was not completely abandoned, and in
certain areas, notably personal status matters, it remained in effect. The
Egyptian legal system thus continued to feature a double-legged structure,
at once civil and religious. It comprised a large corpus of man-made laws,
and at the same time was acknowledged as emanating from the Shari‘a—whose
principles should serve as “a major source of legislation” (from 1980
“the major source”). Laying out this postulate, the constitution
did not specify which Shari‘a “principles” should underlie the law and in
what way, leaving the matter somewhat obscure. To the judges this meant
that the field was left open for interpretation and that they could resort
to the Holy Law (according to the Hanafi school, prevalent in Egypt) for
legal solutions. The potential difficulty ingrained in this obscurity
remained theoretical for a long time: while parliamentarians and
politicians had debated the issue, it had not given ground to open
conflict until the 1990s. But in the last decade of the century, the
traditionalists—struggling to recapture domains invaded by their cultural
rivals—discovered the legal loophole. “Members
of the Islamic groups and terrorists have turned to the judiciary as a
kind of terrorism against thinkers,” Justice ‘Ashmawi has charged. The
government has been more successful in checking them as a security threat
than in confronting them on the ideological plain, he noted; and “since
they have not been eliminated as an ideological force, they have availed
themselves of other avenues, including the courts.”[75]
This assessment by an angry critic of the Islamists is only partly
accurate. Those who have turned to the legal option did not come from the
hitherto-violent wing of the religious sector. Rather, they comprised a
group of highly educated conservative activists, headed by a few Islamist
lawyers. They seem to have adopted this new course after other
channels—party politics, control of professional unions, media campaigns
to advance traditional values—had not produced adequate results. “What
other choice do we have?” Dr. Muhammad Sumayda ‘Abd al-Sumud, the lawyer
who filed the suit against Nasr Abu Zayd, told an interviewer who asked
him why he had sued Abu Zayd rather than debated him publicly. “How can we
debate him? He and his followers have a dominant voice, and they control
multiple press organs.”[76] The
conservatives projected their battle against Abu Zayd and others as a
clear-cut war between Islamic tradition and Westernizing modernity. Most
prominent among them was Shaykh Yusuf al-Badri, a middle-aged lawyer from
Cairo and a former member of the People’s Assembly. In the mid-1990s he
earned a reputation for his recurrent initiatives to take thinkers,
publishers and artists to court for expressing “anti-Islamic” views. Badri
and his colleagues assessed that the duality in Egyptian law was
sufficiently promising, if utilized intelligently and if a large enough
number of litigations were made. They presumably expected that there would
be judges whose faith and personal proclivities would lead them to give
significant weight to Shar‘i considerations.[77]
After all, judges were a part of Egyptian society and could not have been
completely isolated from the changes in the cultural
atmosphere. The
principle on which these suits were based was known as hisba, a
time-honored practice whose rationale was the need to command good and
condemn evil. It permitted any Muslim male to sue any other Muslim for
behaving in an un-Islamic way. A believer could thus defend not only his
own rights in court but also God’s. The advantage of this principle for
those seeking redress for “anti-religious” conduct was obvious: Unlike
civil law, hisba absolved the plaintiff from the need to prove a
personal grievance. The status of this principle in contemporary Egypt has
been a matter of contention, as a result of the dual nature of the
country’s law. While many believed that hisba had lost its
validity, in the mid-1950s if not earlier,[78]
others argued that it had never been annulled, nor should it be, and
quoted instances of rulings based on this principle in the second half of
the twentieth century.[79] Hisba,
as the basis to the suit against Nasr Abu Zayd, proved to be a powerful
device. In early 1996 Yusuf al-Badri announced that he was preparing
similar charges against no less than “42 or 43” writers and artists, among
them Najib Mahfuz.[80]
Badri supported the cases he presented with centuries-old Islamic legal
precedents, a field in which he had special expertise that gave him an
edge over his opponents. One such suit was filed against a movie producer,
Yusuf Shahin, for ideas expressed in his 1994 movie al-Muhajir
(“The Emigrant”). Set in Pharaonic times, the story featured Joseph (a
prophet in Islamic tradition) calling for normalization of relations with
Israel, and depicted one of the Muslim heroes as a eunuch. Badri took
Shahin to court for offending Islamic feelings. In December 1994, the
court accepted Badri’s claim and banned the showing and export of
al-Muhajir. A court of appeals annulled this decision in March
1995, stating that Badri had insufficient grievance in the matter (to wit,
hisba was ruled inapplicable). This last decision, however, was
overruled by a higher court in June 1996.[81]
Another such suit against the owner of a movie theater in 1995 ended in
his being sentenced to three months in prison with hard labor for
displaying a poster showing a movie hero and heroine locked in a
kiss.[82]
When the popular liberal weekly Ruz al-Yusuf mocked Badri for the
last and similar suits and published the “offensive” picture, Badri and
his colleagues sued the journal. A Cairo court sentenced the journal’s
editor to two years imprisonment, but, again, the court of appeals
overruled the decision.[83]
Further sarcastic accounts in Ruz al-Yusuf prompted more litigation
by Badri’s group; in mid-1997 the paper’s editor was reportedly facing no
less than 30 such suits.[84]
In the same vein, Badri’s activists in January 1996 took the popular
actress Yusra to trial for indecent exposure in a poster promoting her
movie Tuyur al-Zalam (Birds of Darkness). They also sued for a ban
on the movie, which was a satire on Islamist lawyers.[85] Two
other issues involving the Islamist lawyers—who came to be known in Cairo
as “the hisba group” or “the shaykhs of takfir”—were more
significant, in that they dealt with deep-rooted and broadly revered
popular customs. The first related to the wearing by women of niqab
(face veil) and hijab (head cover). In May 1994, Minister of
Education Husayn Kamil Baha al-Din issued a directive forbidding young
schoolgirls from wearing the niqab in school unless they produced
written permission from their parents. The decision, the minister
explained, was meant to prevent Islamist teachers from expanding their
influence by forcing girls to wear the traditional dress.[86]
As could be expected, the move was met with the outrage of the religious
circles and a heated public debate ensued. It was widely agreed that both
the niqab and the hijab represented the conservative and
chaste dress code. But was wearing them, strictly speaking, a religious
duty? Islamist lawyers quickly moved to contest Baha al-Din’s decision in
court, arguing that it was issued in defiance “of the heavenly order and
Islamic law.” In August 1994 the court ruled the minister’s decree
invalid. A month later, a higher court reversed the decision and supported
the minister, affirming that wearing the hijab was not an Islamic
duty. Finally, a May 1996 ruling by the Supreme Constitutional Court
upheld this last view. The court stated that the niqab, too, was
not an Islamic dress, thereby sanctioning the minister’s authority to bar
it on university campuses.[87] The
other issue touched a still-more sensitive nerve: the question of
khitan, or female circumcision. The matter exploded in the summer
of 1994, following a biting and graphically harsh CNN report on the
realities of this custom in contemporary Egypt.[88]
The report opened a file that had hardly ever been considered in public.
An old and apparently very common practice, khitan was widely
associated with the proper conduct of a God-fearing community and the
appropriate role of women in it. Many modern-thinking people, however, did
not share this view, and a highly charged controversy erupted over whether
or not khitan represented a religious duty. President Mubarak set
up a committee of experts to consider the issue and, on the basis of its
recommendations, Minister of Health Dr. Isma‘il Salam in July 1996
announced that female circumcision would henceforth be permitted only in
recognized hospitals. The decision thus rendered illegal the popular
performance of khitan by persons without formal medical training.
Badri’s group of lawyers took the matter to court. In June 1997 the court
ruled against the minister, on the procedural grounds that he had
overstepped his authority by issuing a decree that was tantamount to
legislation.[89]
Badri now promised to sue the minister of education, with a demand for
removing those parts of the curriculum that discussed the damage caused by
khitan. The minister of health, for his part, appealed the ruling
against him at the Supreme Constitutional Court, which in December 1997
overruled the previous decision and reinstated the ban on
khitan.[90] These
activities by a small number of firebrand traditionalists seem to have had
a considerable public impact. Some of their initiatives were resounding
successes—notably, the cases of Abu Zayd, the movie al-Muhajir, and
the suit against the theater-owner who had displayed “immoral” posters.
Some of the rulings in the different instances of the legal procedure
could also have been considered triumphs. While the group was small,
certain factors magnified its impact. Most important was the uneasy
coexistence of civil and religious components in the same legal system,
that gray area which made the courts such a convenient arena for the
conservatives. This, combined with the erudition of some of the lawyers
and the presence of traditionally oriented judges, could be utilized to
yield results unattainable otherwise. Once brought to the fore, this
ambiguity in the legal system proved to be a serious flaw in the country’s
law. It was reflected in the inconsistency that typified the handling by
judges of cases initiated by Badri and his colleagues, as if different
magistrates were trying according to different legal systems. Court
rulings were frequently overruled, often for reasons related to the
inadmissibility of hisba or other Shar‘i principles. More
significant, courts repeatedly resorted to technical argumentation rather
than confront the case directly, thus signaling the extreme uneasiness of
the system. Egyptian
observers have tended to dismiss the conservative activists as a marginal
group, a nuisance at worst. The final ruling in the Abu Zayd case had “no
special impact on the social, political, intellectual and legal life of
Egypt,” noted Dr. Muhammad Salim al-‘Awa, an eminent thinker. “Egypt’s
social reality is marked by unmatched tolerance, and the few who raise
such issues periodically would find nobody in the community to support or
follow them.”[91]
The judge who rejected the Badri group suit against Ruz al-Yusuf in
June 1997 similarly described the plaintiffs as “a handful of
psychologically deranged people…. The government ought to place them in
mental institutions.”[92]
Yet, “few” and “deranged” as they may have been, their message did not
pass unnoticed. Focusing on the loophole in the legal system, their legal
initiative underscored the basic cultural dilemma resulting from the
effort to adopt modern institutions alongside the old. That the disruptive
potential of such a challenge was increasingly threatening could be seen
in the government’s response. Perturbed by the damage to the reputation of
the legal system, and by the uncontrolled power of a small group to
inflict it, the regime in January 1996 imposed its control over
hisba, as we shall see later on. Some
time thereafter, this last measure by the authorities, and a series of
Islamist legal defeats created the impression that the conservative legal
offensive was subsiding. By 1997 there were observers who reckoned that
the impact of these circles in the legal arena was “slow[ly] rolling
back.”[93]
Others rejoiced when, in a curious turn of events, Badri found fault in a
new book published by none other than ‘Abd al-Sabur Shahin, the professor
who had labeled Abu Zayd an apostate. Badri accused Shahin himself of
blasphemy and implied that he might sue him if Shahin did not repent. “The
shayks of takfir are falling into the pit they dug for those who
opposed them in thought,” Ruz al-Yusuf jubilantly
announced.[94]
Was the trend really reversing? At the time of this writing it would be
somewhat premature to offer an assessment on that score. We may note,
however, that even if the tendency to exploit Egypt’s legal ambiguities
recedes, the sensitive nerve already exposed will probably continue to
hurt, without resolving the broader cultural quandary reflected in the
country’s judicial dissonance. The Government’s Calculated Indecision Overfive
millenia of highly centralized government have instituted standards of
authoritative rule in Egypt. Today, too, power is wielded by a few,
despite extensive political freedom; and the popular acceptance of a
mighty state as a natural order is still an essential ingredient of
government legitimacy. This popular outlook has been supplemented, in the
twentieth century, by other legitimizing factors: the constitution, which
backed the government’s status with modern political principles, the
highly popular ideological attributes of the Free Officers’ revolution,
party pluralism and freedom of expression that lent them further domestic
respectability. Beyond these factors, and the common acceptance of
centralized rule, the present regime has also depended on the loyalty of
the armed forces that brought it to power in the first place. The vast
majority of Egyptians view the regime as legitimate and expect it to
advance the country’s interests and lead it to a better
future.
As we
have seen, Egyptian governments in modern times sought to develop the
country without directly confronting its old spiritual institutions.
Cultural transformation was expected to develop as a natural corollary of
the rejuvenation of other systems. Thus, while serving as the architect of
modernization, the state did not necessarily act as a conscious agent of
secularization. Rulers did not usually interfere in the public encounters
over cultural issues, unless these encounters infringed upon their own
wielding of power. There was no apparent government involvement in the
Muhammad Abu Zayd case of 1930–31. The government did interfere in the
scandals triggered by the writings of ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq and Taha Husayn,
but only because its own interests were effected: in the former case, ‘Abd
al-Raziq had criticized the “criminal” and “tyrannical” rule of Islamic
monarchs, thereby enraging King Fu’ad and provoking his retaliation; in
Taha Husayn’s case, his affiliation with the Wafd led his political rival,
Prime Minister Isma‘il Sidqi, to exploit Husayn’s book as an excuse to
have him purged. Toward
the end of the twentieth century, the government seems to be adhering to
the same guidelines in the handling of similar affairs. In the Nasr Abu
Zayd affair of the mid-1990s, it stayed out of the fray. State-owned
newspapers and journals did participate in the public debate and expressed
a variety of views on the matter (among them religious organs, which
launched acerbic attacks on Abu Zayd), but these could not be seen as
reflecting an official position. Nor, as far as is known, did the
government intercede with the courts regarding his legal procedure. In the
other recent cases considered above, the authorities’ policy of
non-interference was equally clear. Thus the government permitted the
Ministry of Culture to subject itself to al-Azhar supervision over its
publications, and it kept silent throughout the excited controversy over
religious censorship on art and literature. It allowed the minister of
education to face his conservative critics in court over the wearing of
hijab and niqab in state institutions, and even to lose in
certain stages of the process. Similarly, it allowed the sensitive issue
of khitan to be settled in a battle between another minister and
his opponents in the same arena. Such
governmental behavior has created an impression of disinterest in the
course and consequences of the cultural struggle. This impression is not
altogether false, but it does call for some qualification. The
government’s apparent indifference to the struggle has had its limits: it
has been circumscribed by overlying considerations of state security and
stability. As with any government anywhere, the Egyptian regime’s foremost
commitment is to its own endurance—not an easy task in this big community
with its multiple problems. This principle takes precedence over any
ideological commitment, liberal or otherwise. A typical instance of the
government’s acting upon this kind of consideration was offered in its
handling of the October 1992 earthquake, a disaster that caused many
casualties and devastated extensive property. Voluntary religious
organizations, headed by the Muslim Brotherhood, proved more effective
than state agencies in extending aid to the victims. The Brotherhood
sheltered those who had lost their homes in large halls decorated with
banners asserting “Islam is the Solution!” Realizing that the religious
groups were scoring popularity points at its own expense, the alarmed
government hurriedly decreed it illegal to receive help except through
official channels. It also prescribed heavy penalties on
offenders.[95]
The government’s public image thus took precedence over consideration of
public welfare. This kind of motivation was similarly apparent in the
state handling of hisba. In view of Nasr Abu Zayd’s trial and the
proliferation of hisba suits, in January 1996 the government moved
to “modernize” this device by issuing a law disallowing the filing of such
suits except through the public prosecutor. Hisba remained a
recognized principle, but its application was henceforth to be regulated
by the state. Rather than resort to the potentially controversial measure
of eliminating hisba altogether, the government found a way to
reassert its authority while retaining the problematic principle. The
bottom-line message was clear. The regime would not tolerate people or
groups wielding power uncontrolled by itself. But in caring for its own
stability it should not be expected to devise fundamental solutions for
the deep-rooted dilemmas of cultural orientation.[96] Nor
have such restrictive moves by the state been limited to the religious
trend. The government has purported to share the liberal-secularist
outlook to a certain extent. But the regime’s interests have not been
identical with those of the liberals. Its advocacy of democratization and
civil liberties has likewise been subordinate to the overriding principle
of stability. Hence, when newspapers, enjoying a basically unmolested
freedom under Mubarak, resorted to exceedingly aggressive criticism of
certain cabinet members, the regime moved to redraw the lines. A legal
amendment in May 1995 seriously circumscribed the press, thereby reversing
previous liberal achievements. A forceful encounter with the journalists
ensued, lasting for more than a year, at the end of which the press found
itself more limited than before.[97]
This, and similar instances of disagreement between the state and the
non-religious opposition, disconcerted the liberals, who tended to look
upon the government as their partner in the fateful battle against
obscurantism. Liberal writers repeatedly voiced their dismay at this
“ingratitude” on the regime’s part toward its “natural allies”. “Many of
us,” stated Professor Sa‘d al-Din Ibrahim, “fail to comprehend why
President Mubarak’s regime would unjustifiably and unnecessarily alienate
Egypt’s journalists and intellectuals so recklessly when for the previous
four years they had stood with him against terrorism.”[98]
Ibrahim should not have been surprised. The government’s priorities were
neither secretive nor unclear. But
there is more to the government’s stance in the cultural struggle than
just guarding against infringements upon its own standing. Far from being
oblivious to its public image, the authorities’ approach to the struggle
is typically utilitarian. Its tolerance of the non-religious opposition,
the captious press and the sometimes-embarrassing rulings of the
judiciary, on the one hand, and of the religious trend, on the other, are
carefully calculated measures designed to consolidate the regime’s
popularity. This is particularly evident in its attentiveness to popular
religious sentiment. In the wake of religious revival, so it seems, the
present regime is in need of the legitimizing support of religion more
than its forerunners. This need has roots that go back to the abolition of
the Caliphate in the 1920s and the subsequent fall of the monarchy in
1952, the more-or-less accepted successor to the previous Islamic
government. Nasser, who championed a comprehensive alternative
belief-system, nonetheless chose to subordinate the religious institutions
to his regime so as to bolster its authority within a society that still
largely subscribed to the old creed. Sadat after him relied still more on
religion as a source of legitimacy. Mubarak, conscious of the dim lure of
his down-to-earth pragmatism and recognizing the potency of tradition, has
been keen on securing the backing of the religious establishment. Mubarak
has tended to make it a point, when dealing with controversial issues, to
receive ‘Ulama’ affirmation of his policies. Thus, for example, he invited
and received fatwas supporting his campaign to encourage family
planning.[99]
Family planning was high on Mubarak’s list of priorities, and when
addressing this issue on innumerable occasions he presented persuasive
rational arguments to his audiences. Yet he knew that his message would be
wanting in authority without an Islamic sanction. Similarly, when the
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in
Cairo in September 1994, was condemned by conservatives, Mubarak solicited
the support of the Grand Mufti, Shaykh Muhammad Husayn Tantawi. The Mufti
offered a half-hearted endorsement; and Mubarak found it expedient to add
his own reassurance, announcing that “the ICPD will not change our
religious values [and]…time-honored traditions.” Egypt, he assured his
popular constituency, “will not accept any recommendations that would
contradict its religion.”[100] The
regime’s readiness to accept al-Azhar’s authority in literary and artistic
matters should also be seen in this context. So should the ample access to
the broadcast media the state offers to prominent religious figures, which
lends the state a measure of religious authenticity and, equally
important, helps in isolating the radicals. Whether or not this policy
actually increases the government’s public legitimacy is a question more
easily posed than answered with any certainty.[101]
It is clear, however, that the regime’s desire to have religious backing
exacts the price of limiting its own freedom of action. This limit was
clearly highlighted during the juridical discussion of female
circumcision. The attorney representing the minister of health asked the
judge to reject the Islamist Yusuf al-Badri’s hisba suit, since
according to the January 1996 hisba law Badri, as a private
individual, had no right to submit such a suit. The judge, however, ruled
that Badri did enjoy such a right as a Muslim, regardless of the law,
thereby focusing the spotlight exactly on the regime’s painful
dilemma.[102] The
government is willing to pay a comparable price for its commitment to the
values advocated by the liberal-secularists. The measured freedom of
action and expression and an autonomous judiciary have the obvious
advantage of a control mechanism at home and an improved image abroad
(which, in turn, entails strategic and economic benefits).[103]
In return the government has to contend with criticism, often harsh, and
with court rulings that are sometimes uncomfortable (the premature
dissolving of the People’s Assembly twice during Mubarak’s first decade in
office was an unmistakable illustration of the irritating cost). This is
seen as an affordable price, however, which does not jeopardize the
government’s dominance. The regime’s main concern in its handling of both
the liberal and traditionalist trends is to ensure that the immediate
political benefits outweigh the cost. Other aspects of their activities,
and the tension between them, are of secondary import. Conclusion The
ingrained tension between two trends continues to dominate Egypt’s search
for cultural orientation at the end of the twentieth century just as at
its beginning. It may not be the most important item on the country’s
agenda—indeed, sizeable segments of its society are preoccupied with more
immediate mundane concerns. Still, cultural issues continue to dominate
much of the public debate and, furthermore, to influence in many subtle
ways even the non-participants. The trials and errors of a whole century
have not brought a solution to the dilemmas any closer; if anything, they
seem to have confused matters. At times the gulf separating the two
contending camps appears even wider than before. At other times it is less
so. At all times the issue is alive and contentious. As so
often, it is the more assertive spokesmen of the extreme wings on both
sides who draw the lines of the battle. Uncompromising Islamist activists
such as Shahin and Badri, daring secularists such as Fuda, Abu Zayd and
Qimani, capture the center-stage. They are the ones who produce the
climactic events, thus sometimes creating an over-dramatized picture of
the conflict. Alongside these thunderous clashes, a continuous exchange is
taking place between spokesmen for the two camps, who represent a wide
range of sub-trends. Their voices may be moderate, and they presumably
seek to reach a compromise and show that disagreements may not be as sharp
as they seem. But their conciliatory message is all too often drowned out
by the more combative pronouncements of the
struggle. As we
have seen, at the root of this tension lies the country’s historic choice
to preserve its spiritual heritage while undergoing modernization based on
the import of ideas from another world with another heritage. Egypt has
thus opted for an equivocal cultural formula, a blueprint for the
perpetuation of cultural and political tension. The basic quandary
engrained in this formula remains unresolved. At the close of the
twentieth century, most of those who address the issue, while weighing the
options, still stop short of adopting an unequivocal line that would
settle the dilemma. They do not give up religion as a paramount cultural
code for the community, but try instead to reconcile it with other,
basically secular values. Thus, the courts that considered the issues of
niqab, hijab and khitan focused on the question of
whether or not these were “Islamic” customs, and ruled accordingly; the
Islamic nature of these habits was the yardstick for their relevance to
contemporary Egypt. The same approach was displayed by the state, the
trail-blazer of modernization, when handling the hisba issue:
rather than invalidate hisba as a principle of law—a measure for
which a strong legal case could have been made—the government chose to
recognize its validity. The product of this endeavor to reconcile the
traditional and the modern is a perplexing mix. It may be less confusing
for those possessing Abu Zayd’s sophistication. But Abu Zayd is hardly
representative. The
government’s role in the struggle for the country’s soul is thus limited,
by its own choice. Secular at heart, the regime’s policies are consonant
with liberal tenets. But it refrains from carrying the banner of
secularist ideology, or any other ideological banner for that matter. Its
role in this struggle is one of containment, not leadership. Seeking a
balance, it tries to block sharp turns in any direction, be they toward
greater conservatism or greater liberalism. It allows the debate to
proceed, and would conceivably let the cultural chips fall where they may,
so long as this does not interfere with its own hold on
power. Where
is this struggle leading? The range of possible options is broad. A likely
scenario is one of more-of-the-same. Egyptian society is big and diverse
enough, its tradition of social tolerance strong enough, to allow for
different orientations to coexist and even clash, without necessarily
tipping the scale decisively in favor of any one of them, for a long time
to come.
[1]Cf. Shimon Shamir, “Historical
traditions and modernity in the belief-system of the Egyptian mainstream,”
in S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Patterns of Modernity, Vol. 2: Beyond
the West (London: Frances Pinter, 1987), pp. 119ff. [2]Among the studies on the Abu Zayd
affair are: Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Al-tafkir fi zaman al-takfir
(Cairo: Sina lil-Nashr, 1995); idem (ed.), Al-qawl al-mufid fi qadiyyat
Abu Zayd (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1995); Navid Kermani, “Die affäre
Abû Zayd, eine kritik am religiösen diskurs und ihre folgen,”
Orient, Vol. 35, No. 1 (1994), pp. 25–49; Mona Abaza, “Civil
society and Islam in Egypt: the case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Journal
of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1995),
pp. 29–42; Baudouin Dupret and Bajazet, “L’Affaire Abû Zayd, universitaire
poursuivi pour apostasie,” Monde arabe, Maghreb Machrek, No. 151
(January–March 1996), pp. 18–31; “The case of Abu Zaid,” Index on
Censorship, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1996), pp. 30–39; Fouad Ajami, The
Dream Palace of the Arabs (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), pp.
212–21; George N. Sfeir, “Basic Freedoms in a fractured legal culture:
Egypt and the case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Middle East Journal,
Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer 1998), pp. 402–14. I am grateful to Professor
Gudrun Krämer for drawing my attention to some of these
sources. [3]Abu Zayd had previously criticized the
“Islamic investments companies,” which had been set up several years
earlier to compete with the banks and had collapsed amidst a public
scandal in 1988. Shahin was reportedly involved in the matter as advisor
to the companies, and may have felt personally assaulted by Abu Zayd’s
criticism. See “The case of Abu Zayd,” Index on Censorship, pp.
36–37; Ajami, The Dream Palace, pp. 213–14. [5]E.g., al-Musawwar, 25 June;
Ruz al-Yusuf, 19, 26 June 1995; al-Akhbar, al-Ahram,
19 June 1995; Abu Zayd’s interview with Mahmud al-Wardani in
al-Hayat, 16 September 1996. [6]See the explanation by a former deputy
president of the Court of Cassations concerning the legal measures still
possible at that point, in al-Wasat, 12 August
1996. [7]Al-Liwa al-Islami, 22 June
1995; Washington Times, 28 June 1995. Similarly al-Musawwar
23 June 1995. [12]The only scholarly references to it
known to the present writer are Arthur Jeffery’s article, “The suppressed
Qur’an commentary of Muhammad Abu Zaid,” Der Islam, XX (1932), pp.
301–8, and a brief reference in H.A.R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1947), p. 54. Egyptian historians, on
the whole, have overlooked the case. Recently there appeared some
reference to this affair in the Egyptian press; see e.g. Ruz
al-Yusuf, 26 June 1995. [13]Two books published in the 1920s
carried the name Muhammad Abu Zayd as their author: Al-zawaj wal-talaq
al-madani fil-Islam (Cairo: Matba‘t al-Taqaddum, 1346/1927); and
Mukhtasar min zad al-mu‘ad (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Istiqama, n.d.). See
also al-Muqtataf, LVII (December 1920), p. 512, for another
reference to a book by an author of the same name. [22]Jeffrey, p. 302. See also Ruz
al-Yusuf, 26 June 1995, p. 42, where the story is told in brief (but
apparently with some confusion in dates). [23]Charles C. Adams, Islam and
Modernism in Egypt (New York: Russel & Russel, 1933), pp. 259–68;
Ahmad Baha al-Din, Ayyam laha ta’rikh (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab
al-‘Arabi, 1954), pp. 213–40; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the
Liberal Age 1798-1939 (London: R.I.I.A., 1962), pp. 184–92; Muhammad
‘Imara, Al-islam wa-usul al-hukm li-‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (Beirut:
al-Muassasa al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 1972; Hamid Enayat,
Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1982), pp. 62–68; Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt,
Islam and the Arabs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp.
60ff; Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism, a Critique of Development
Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 128–69;
Ghali Shukri, Al-nahda wal-suqut fil-fikr al-misri al-hadith
(Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1992), pp.
235–47. [24]Adams, pp. 254–59; Shukri, pp. 247–58;
Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard university Press, 1961), pp. 130–31, 153–55, 165–67; Charles
Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Egypt (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1983), pp. 92–95. [25]Daniel Crecelius, “The course of
secularization in modern Egypt,” in John L. Esposito (ed.), Islam and
development: Religion and Sociopolitical Change (New York: Syracuse
University Press, 1980), pp. 54–63. [26]Husayn al-Marsafi Risalat al-kalim
al-thaman (Cairo, 1981), pp. 30–32. For the popular effect of ‘Ulama’
injunctions against the press, see e.g. al-Manar, Vol. 1 (1897–98),
p. 660; al-‘Irfan, 12 January 1910, p. 28. [27]‘Abd al-Latif Hamza, Adab al-maqala
al-sahafiyya fi misr, Vol. IV (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr al-‘Arabi, 1959),
pp. 111–22; Sulayman Salih, Al-Shaykh ‘Ali Yusuf wa-jaridat
al-mu’ayyad (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1990),
pp. 45–59. Yusuf’s trial took place in 1904. [28]For al-Manar’s criticism of
‘Abd al-Raziq, see issue of June 1925, pp. 100–5. For the attack on Taha
Husayn see issue of December 1926, pp. 678–87. See also notes 19–21
above. [29]See Nadav Safran, “The abolition of
the shar‘i courts in Egypt,” Muslim World, 48 (1958), pp. 20–28;
Daniel Crecelius, “Al-Azhar in the revolution,” Middle East
Journal, 20 (1966), pp. 31–49. [30]Daniel Crecelius, “Nonideological
responses of the Egyptian Ulama to modernization,” in Nikki R. Keddie,
Scholars, Saints and Sufis (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1972), p. 208. [32]Manfred Halpern, The Politics of
Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 25ff, 129ff. [34]Egypt’s population in the 1927 census
was ca. 14.1 million; Charles Issawi, Egypt, an Economic and Social
Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 44. By January
1982 it had reached 44 million; al-Ahram, 24 January 1982. By the
mid-1990s the population had crossed the 60-million mark, reaching 61.5
million in the 1996 census; al-Ahram, 3 June
1997. [35]For the 1930 figure see Charles
Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), tables on pp. 94, 101. By
1986, according to the census of that year, Greater Cairo’s population
(including that of Giza), had reached ca. 13.5 million out of a population
of ca. 50.5 million; al-Ahram, 19 April 1987; al-Jumhuriyya
(Cairo), 20 April 1987. [36]For the 1917 data see Egyptian
Government, Ministry of Finance, The Census of Egypt, Taken in 1917
(Cairo, 190?), Vol. 2, p. 565. For the 1937 data see Issawi, Egypt
at Mid-Century, an Economic Survey (London, 1954), p. 64. In 1975
Egypt’s adult illiteracy was assessed at 56%; see Issawi, An Economic
History, p. 230. According to the 1986 census, illiteracy had by then
dropped to 49.6%, and the 1996 census registered a further decline to
38.6%; see al-Ahram, 3 June 1997. [38]E.g., Radio Cairo, 13 November—FBIS,
Daily Report (Middle East and Africa), 13 November 1980; Radio
Cairo, 29 January 1981—FBIS, Daily Report, 3 February 1981; Radio
Cairo, 9 March 1981—FBIS, Daily Report, 10 March 1981; Radio Cairo,
9 May 1981—FBIS, Daily Report, 12 May 1981. [42]Sadat’s speech to National Democratic
Party leaders, Radio Cairo, 19 February 1981—FBIS, Daily Report, 24
February 1981. [43]Radio Cairo, 12 February 1987—BBC,
Summary of World Broadcasting (Middle East and Africa), 14 February
1987; Jerusalem Post, 13 February 1987. [47]Al-Ahram, 26 June 1965; Ruz
al-Yusuf’ 26 June 1995. A similar move taken by al-Azhar in 1981—the
banning of Luis ‘Awad, Muqaddima fi fiqh al-lugha
al-‘arabiyya—could also be regarded as belonging to the same phase;
see Ghali Shukri, Al-muthaqqafun wal-sulta fi misr (Cairo: Dar
Akhbar al-Yawm, 1990), pp. 337–38, 356–57. [48]For a discussion of these
developments, see Crecelius, “Al-Azhar in the revolution,” pp. 31–49;
idem,“The course of
secularization,” pp. 63–70. [49]Jerusalem Post (quoting Ahmad
Shawqi), 17 December 1986; Uktubar, 14 August 1988;
al-Akhbar, 15 November 1988; al-Ahram, 8 June 1989;
al-Masa, 6 June 1990. [50]Al-Munazzama al-misriyya li-huquq
al-insan, Hurriyyat al-ra’y wal-‘aqida; quyud wa-ishkaliyyat. Vol.
2: Riqabat al-Azhar ‘ala al-musannafat al-sam‘iyya wal-sam‘iyya
al-basariyya (Cairo, 1994), esp. pp. 137ff; Le Monde, 30
December 1991. The sentence, however, was not confirmed by the prime
minister and was not carried out. [51]Middle East International, 21
January 1994; New York Times, 3 February 1994; Index on
Censorship, No. 1–2 (1994), pp. 124–25. [52]Index on Censorship, ibid. See
also Steven Barraclough, “Al-Azhar: between the government and the
Islamists,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 52, No. 2 (spring 1998), pp.
242ff. [54]Al-Hayat, 20 August 1997;
interview with Qimani in al-Musawwar, 29 August 1997; Cairo
Times, 17 September 1997. [55]Interviews with Shaykh Sami
al-Sha‘rawi and Shaykh ‘Abd al Mu‘izz al-Jazar in al-Musawwar, 29
August 1997; Cairo Times, 17 September 1997. [56]Al-Ahram, al-Akhbar, 14
May 1998. A similar scandal occurred several months later, when a
professor in the same institution was instructed by the university
administration to remove Muhammad Shukri’s novel, Al-khubz al-hafi,
from her course syllabus, as it allegedly contained offensive “sexually
explicit passages.” See al-Wafd, 7, 11, 14 January 1999;
al-Ahram Weekly, 28 January—3 February 1999. [59]‘Ashmawi’s interview, Ruz
al-Yusuf, 19 June 1995, where he complains of such outside
interference in the court’s work during the Abu Zayd
case. [60]For Ghazali’s testimony see
al-Nur, 30 June 1993. For the court’s decision and arguments,
al-Ahram, 23 January 1994. Ghazali’s testimony prompted a
passionate public response; see Meir Hatina, Liberal Discourse and
Islamism in Post-Revolutionary Egypt – Faraj ‘Ali Fuda, unpublished
PhD. Dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 1997, pp.
109–10. [61]Al-Nur, 3 June 1992. For the
formation of this group, which called itself nadwat al-‘ulama’
(‘Ulama’ council, or club), and their statements against the
secularists, see al-Haqiqa (Cairo), 21 March 1992; al-Nur, 1
April 1992; Hurriyyati (Cairo), 12 April 1992. See also Hatina, pp.
107–9. [64]Ruz al-Yusuf, 12 May 1997;
al-Wasat, 12, 19 May 1997; al-Majalla, 18–24 May 1997;
al-Mushahid al-Siyasi, 18–24 May 1997. See also Civil
Society, May 1997. The affair was a part of a long conflict between
the Front and Tantawi, which led to the dismantling of the Front in Summer
1998. See al-Musawwar, 12 June 1998; al-Da‘wa,
August–September 1998; al-Wasat, 7 September
1998. [67]Hatina, pp. 101–2; Fauzi M. Najjar,
“The debate on Islam and secularism in Egypt,” Arab Studies
Quarterly, 18, 2 (Spring 1996), pp. 11–17; al-Ahali, 4 April
1990. [74]See al-Wasat, 12 August 1996,
p. 16—a reference to two cases from the 1930s and 1940s, in which the
courts considered ridda cases and ordered the separation between
husband and wife. [76]Al-Liwa’ al-Islami, 22 June
1995. Asked whether political objectives had played a role in his
initiative, Abu Sumud replied: “I swear to God Almighty, there is no
political motivation behind this call. I am not a party member, nor do I
belong to any political trend. I am telling you that the purpose is
defending the faith of this society from the anarchy of the insolent and
apostates.” See similarly al-Wasat, 12 August
1996. [77]‘Ashamwi’s interview in Ruz
al-Yusuf, 19 June 1995. Cf. Also Middle East International, 11
July 1997, where the political agenda of judges is
considered. [78]E.g., ‘Ashmawi in Ruz al-Yusuf,
19 June 1995; al-Sayyid Yasin in al-Ahram, 29 June 1995; Najib
Mahfuz, quoted in al-Musawwar, 26 January 1996. For a discussion of
hisba and its broader implications in Egyptian law, see Sfeir, pp.
404ff; also Civil Society, March 1996, pp. 18–21. [79]E.g., al-Liwa’ al-Islami, 22
June 1995; Yusuf Badri’s interview in al-Musawwar, 26 January 1996.
See also the interview with lawyer Ahmad Sayf al-Islam in Middle East
Report, November–December 1995, pp. 25–27. [80]Badri’s interview in
al-Musawwar, 26 January 1996. See also the report on Badri in
al-Wasat, 14 July 1997. [81]Shahin’s interview in Der
Spiegel, quoted by Ha’aretz, 28 March 1995; Agence France
Presse, 29 March 1995—FBIS, Daily Report, 30 March 1995;
al-Nur, 12 June 1996. [82]Agence France Presse, 1 July
1995—FBIS, Daily Report, 7 July 1995; Ruz al-Yusuf, 10 July
1995; ‘Aqidati, 14 July 1995. [87]Agence France Press, 23, 29 August
1995—FBIS, Daily Report, 24, 29 August 1994; Middle East News
Agency, 23 August, 15 September 1994—FBIS, Daily Report, 24 August,
16 September 1994; al-Watan al-‘Arabi, 7 May 1996; al-Nur,
12 June 1996. [94]Ruz al-Yusuf, 4, 11 January
1999. See also Amira Huwaydi in al-Ahram Weekly, 21–28 January
1999. [95]Radio Cairo, 18, 24 October 1992—FBIS,
Daily Report, 19, 27 October 1992; Middle East
International, 23 October 1992. See further in Middle East
Contemporary Survey (MECS), Vol. 16 (1992), pp.
373–74. [96]Al- Akhbar, al-Ahram,
al-Wafd, 30 January 1996; al-Musawwar, 2 February 1996;
al-`Alam, Civil Society, March 1996. [100]
MENA, 6 August 1994—FBIS, Daily Report, 8 August 1994; Radio Cairo,
14 August 1994—FBIS, Daily Report, 15 August 1994. For the
contention over the ICPD see MECS, Vol. 18 (1994), pp. 271–73;
Barraclough, pp. 244–45. [101]
For an assessment that the government does not manage to gain more
legitimacy by such tactics, while increasing the credibility of the
Islamist discourse, see Mustapha Kamil al-Sayyid, “A civil society in
Egypt?” in Augustus Richard Norton (ed.), Civil Society in the Middle
East (Leiden: Brill, 1995), Vol. 1, p. 292. |
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Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies,