A Quiet Revolution (24 page)

the country’s sharp descent into intolerance, as well as a stark measure of how drastically it had changed through recent decades.

Such attacks on writers were perhaps inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
1989
fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The turmoil it caused in Western societies, particularly Britain, possibly made the targeting of in- tellectuals seem an attractive strategy for militant Islamists whose anger was directed at Western powers, as well as at local governments and local writers.

In
1992
the journalist Farah Foda, a well-known critic of Islamism, had been assassinated. Foda, although reportedly personally religious, was a committed supporter of secular government.
20
Foda’s murder and the ensuing trial caused consternation among many, for at the trial Muhammad al-Ghazali, the prominent Islamist, appeared on behalf of the defense.

Al-Ghazali had previously taken clear stands against violence, re- peatedly rejecting it as un-Islamic. He had denounced the attempted murder of Mahfouz as a “crime against Islam.”
21
On this occasion, how- ever, al-Ghazali argued that “anyone who resisted the full imposition of Islamic law was an apostate who should be killed either by the govern- ment or by devout individuals,”
22
a statement that provoked strong crit- icism. The Egyptian High Court of State Security rejected the defense’s argument, noting that people could not be allowed to accuse others of heresy and apply punishment to them “according to his own whims” or according to the “misguided” fatwas of those “who claim authority in religion.” They sentenced one of the two accused to death, and the sec- ond to fifteen years’ hard labor.
23

As noted earlier, the Brotherhood and mainstream Islamists did not es- pouse or support violence.
24
On the other hand, the growing influence of the Brotherhood and of mainstream Islamists in society and in the professions did lead to a growing atmosphere of repression. In these years the legal system was used by Islamist lawyers to, in effect, harass and per- secute people who did not share the views of Islamists. In
1991
the writer Ala Hamid was sentenced to eight years in prison for writing a book that was considered blasphemous.

Similarly, in
1993
, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a professor at Cairo Uni- versity, was denied tenure and brought to trial on the grounds that he was an apostate. As there was no apostasy law in Egypt, an Islamist lawyer

had filed suit demanding Abu Zayd’s forcible divorce from his wife on the grounds that a Muslim may not be married to a non-Muslim. The court eventually ruled the marriage null and void—and Abu Zayd and his wife had to flee to Europe for asylum. This current of thought and legal action would continue in Egypt. In
1999
another such case was brought against the feminist Nawal el-Saadawi, also attempting to forcibly divorce her from her husband on grounds of her purported apostasy. Eventually the court would rule—in the summer of
2001
—in favor of el-Saadawi.
‌

The violence that began to tear at the country in the early
1990
s would continue to escalate, culminating in the massacre at Luxor in
1997
when sixty people, most of them tourists, were gunned down. The at- tack had been carried out by Islamic Jihad, a group at this point headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri (a figure well-known today as Osama bin Laden’s second in command). Intent on dealing a crippling blow to the Egyp- tian economy, of which tourism was a vital component, the attack pro- voked shock and revulsion in Egypt “at this completely unprecedented slaughter of foreign visitors.” Many Egyptians who depended on tourism for their livelihood were directly affected by these murderous acts. The event proved to be a “turning point in the counter-terrorism campaign in Egypt” as the government cracked down on militants who were now loathed by the population.
25

The changes and the powerful Islamist current that was under way, and most particularly the issue of Islamist militancy and violence, were now matters of public concern that were being addressed in the media. By the early
1990
s, for example, critics had begun openly lamenting that the “influence of Wahhabi Islam (the ultra-conservative strand of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia) had begun to erode the more flexible and permissive form of popular Islam that had evolved in Egypt.”
26

Others forthrightly took up the issue of Islamist militant violence.
Akhir Sa‘a
(a “semi-official” journal, Wickham notes) published an ar- ticle claiming that extremists were using mosques as recruiting grounds. “From inside the private mosques,” the article declared, “the light of re- ligious extremism beams forth.”

Militant groups, the article continued, were using mosques to store

weapons, and Islamists were “trapping” innocent youth: “The private mosques have become the biggest snare of the youth, who comes origi- nally to pray, but who, upon being ready to leave, is seized by an ex- tremist as his next victim, who sits him down and whispers at him, and his nice-sounding, honeyed words have an effect, who promises him a straight path to heaven if he obeys the ruling of God (and the extremist takes it upon himself to interpret what they are) and warning him of the sufferings of hell if he disobeys.” In this way, “unsuspecting youth, who started out just wanting to pray, ends up a member of a Shawqiyya or Ikhwaniyya... or Salafiyya extremist group which are enemies of the state.” The writers emphasized that they were not calling for “a halt to the building of new mosques” but “for a change in what is going on inside them, especially now that some of them have become laboratories for the incubation of extremism.”
27

It was against the backdrop of such events and public discussions that the fracas over schools and in particular over veiling in schools erupted. After the appearance of the ministry of education’s report claiming that many government schools and teachers had links with illegal Islamist organi- zations, the weekly magazine
Ros al Yousef,
another semi-official publi- cation, also conducted its own independent study of Islamist extremism in schools. It reported that the Muslim Brotherhood was “buying up pre- schools and elementary schools, and that Jihad [an extremist group] ex- erted control over teacher training institutes.”
28

Ros al Yousef
also reported that teachers purportedly “preached to students about the apostate Egyptian government” and “played recorded sermons of the dissident Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.” Sheikh Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric who would later be charged in the United States

for his involvement in the
1993
bombing of the World Trade Center, had

been advisor to militant jihadists groups in Egypt in the
1970
s, including the group which assassinated Sadat. Through the
1980
s he had been ac- tive in Pakistan and elsewhere, recruiting jihadists for the war in Afghan- istan. On his return to Egypt after the end of the Afghan war he was under investigation for involvement in terrorist activities when he man- aged to flee to America.

Stories were now commonplace in the Egyptian press and also fig-

ured in complaints to the ministry about how “teachers were either forc- ing or scaring young girls into wearing the hijab.” Reportedly cassette sermons on the theme of the Torture of the Grave (Azab al Qabr) were in wide circulation.

The new education minister, Baha Eddin, set out to change the cur- riculum and purge Islamists from government schools. Since, as gov- ernment employees, they could not be fired, he transferred them instead to other employment in remote areas. Some contested their transfer in court, and in some instances they won. One such case, for example, in- volved the principal of the Mother of the Believers Secondary School for Girls, who had been transferred for allegedly compelling a girl to wear hijab. The court ruled that “inviting students to be conservative, re- spectable and wearing hijab is not in opposition to the constitution which draws on the sharia as the source of legislation.”

The government tried also to impose restraints on school dress, in- troducing laws banning hijab for girls in grades one through five and re- quiring girls in middle school who wished to wear it to obtain written permission from guardians—thereby giving parents rather than teach- ers authority over children’s attire. Government officials were deployed outside schools to enforce the regulation.

The consequence was a debacle for the government. Schoolgirls re- acted with horror to seeing their friends and peers being barred from en- tering school, and children as well as teachers joined in the protest against such measures. As one student later recalled: “All of us students were in- volved in this and we encouraged each other. The teachers also got in- volved. Even the girls who didn’t use to wear the hijab came to school wearing it. We wrote slogans on the walls and encouraged each other to wear hijab.”

Parents also protested, stating, for example, as did one father: “I am a simple Muslim and I don’t belong to any extremist organizations or even a political party. I just tried to follow the instructions of our re- ligion, the first of which is to raise my children in the proper Islamic way.” Furthermore, in addition to being vigorously contested in the press, the ruling on hijab led to lawsuits in which parents sued for the rights of their daughters to wear hijab in primary school—lawsuits which were defended and often won by Islamist lawyers.

Linda Herrera, a scholar who studied these events in detail, con- cluded that overall the government’s attempt to ban the veil in schools showed quite clearly that, for girls and women, the hijab and the teach- ings of conservative forms of Islam (that is, the practices of Islamism) had become the normative, expected, and even desired practice for many. “Large numbers of Muslim parents and students,” Herrara wrote, quite evidently now approved of “the Islamization of education—not for political but for cultural reasons. They consider it appropriate for ed- ucators to socialize Egyptian youth as pious and culturally conservative Muslims.”

It was this profound and pervasive transformation in the norms and practices of Islam that Islamism had brought about—and in scarcely more than two decades—that was and is perhaps its most remarkable achievement. As another academic astutely observed, the Islamist trend’s “most characteristic manifestations” in Egypt “are not unpredictable outbreaks of sectarian violence, bombing conspiracies or the angry de- nunciations of creative artists (whether Salman Rushdie or Naguib Mah- fouz) but rather the manifold changes it [the Islamic trend] has created in the way educated Egyptians practice, apprehend, and represent their religious heritage.”
29

What had been, a mere twenty years earlier, the revolutionary re- ligious practices and beliefs of Islamist activists on the margins of main- stream society had pervasively become, by the mid-
1990
s, the ordinary, normal practices of the majority of Egyptians.

The most recent of the three studies focusing on Islamism and casting important light on the spread of veiling and women’s involvement with the Islamist movement—or with the Tayar al-Islamiy, the Islamic Trend

—is by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, entitled
Mobilizing Islam.
Wickham, who conducted her research mostly through the early
1990
s, was inter- ested above all in studying and understanding the mainstream Islamist movement, not its militant fringe. For, she writes, “despite the high pro- file of Egypt’s Islamic militants, it should be recalled that (
1
) they repre- sent only a tiny fraction of those Egyptians active in the Islamic movement as a whole and that (
2
) their use of violence is repudiated not only by the general Egyptian public but also by the majority of people in the Islamic

movement itself.” Thus Wickham sets out to study the mainstream Is- lamist movement and to explore and analyze the means and processes that enabled Islamists to succeed “in capturing the hearts and minds of educated youth.”
30

Drawing on a variety of materials, including interviews with grad- uates and young professionals—people who had been in college in the seventies and eighties—the book offers vivid examples of how and by what steps, on a concrete, practical level, Islamists set about persuading others to accept their beliefs and ways, including their styles of dress. At the same time, Wickham’s material offers illuminating glimpses of the goals, motivations, methods, and strategies of Islamists.

The common thread among Wickham’s interviewees was their commitment to Islamist activism and their shared understanding of Islam as fundamentally entailing and requiring activism and service for the improvement of society and state. Some of them held jobs in Islamic institutions, but the majority had their main job in unrelated areas and worked part time in the service of Islamism, often for very low pay or on a volunteer basis. Lawyers, engineers, doctors, and other professionals offered their services in Islamic health clinics, day-care centers, kinder- gartens, and after-school programs; or they taught religious lessons or (if they were men) preached at the mosque.

Activism and a sense of obligation and responsibility to work to re- form and improve society were the defining features, Wickham found, of Islamists’ “radically new and activist interpretation of the Islamic faith.” Asserting that participating in the work of improving society and state was a religious obligation of every Muslim (a
fard
), Islamists re- jected the “confinement of religion to matters of private faith and rit- ual,” emphasizing rather that Islam was “
din wa dawla:
both a system of individual faith and conduct and a comprehensive guide for the organ- ization of society and state.”

Motivating them in their own work as activists was the desire to bring about change and build a new and just Islamic society. This broad goal and vision was shared, Wickham found, by Islamists across the spec- trum, regardless of whether they were affiliated with the Muslim Broth- erhood, say—which rejected violence—or with more militant Islamist organizations. Wickham found too that her interviewees, who belonged