What came before… What lies ahead?
Egypt: Straight from the heart
BY YOGINDER SIKAND
Signs of the despair and rage of the ‘Arab street’ that
have finally burst out into angry protests across the region were
in ample evidence when I visited Egypt last year although I must
confess I did not expect they would take the form that they now have.
Forty days traversing the country, including a fortnight in Cairo and
trips to the Mediterranean coast, isolated oases in the Sahara and
down the Nile to Abu Simbel and to Aswan near the Sudanese border,
were, to put it politely, no relaxed vacation. Egypt, despite being a
favourite holiday destination that attracts hundreds of thousands of
foreign tourists every year, is not quite an easy country for a lone
tramp on a shoestring budget to navigate.
Cairo, home to
almost half of Egypt’s population, is a rapidly decaying city. I chose
to stay in a dirt cheap funduq, a lodge frequented by travelling
Egyptian and other African door-to-door salesmen which was located in
the heart of the old city, also called ‘Islamic Cairo’. It was
situated in a narrow lane just off the grand Al-Hussain mosque which,
according to local lore (although this is contested), contains the
severed head of Imam Hussain, grandson of the prophet.
My
Cairene friends were horrified at my decision. A cafeteria in the
area, which was once popular with foreign tourists, had been bombed
recently and numerous people, including some tourists, had been
killed. “All sorts of shady characters lurk in these parts,” they
warned. Hardly any foreign tourists, they said, dared to stay there
now, preferring hotels in the more upmarket parts near the Nile for
safety. The area, they added in order to dissuade me, was filthy. But
I had to save money for the long stay I had intended and this
miserable funduq was all I could afford. Besides, I wanted to see life
in ‘Islamic Cairo’ first-hand. My ramshackle rat-infested inn, which
charged me the equivalent of 300 rupees a night for a diminutive room,
was the best place to be based in for that purpose.
Densely
populated ‘Islamic Cairo’ consists of a maze of lanes that envelops a
dazzling number of ancient Islamic monuments – mosques, madrassas,
tombs and Sufi lodges – some of which go back to as early as the
eighth century. At the heart of this sprawling quarter is the grand
Al-Azhar, considered to be the world’s most influential seat of Sunni
Muslim scholarship. Despite its historical importance, ‘Islamic
Cairo’, like much of the rest of the city, and indeed all of Egypt,
had, as I saw it then, all the telltale signs of despair and
discontent that are now being excitedly discussed in the media. Most
of the houses in the area, narrow and dingy and built cheek by jowl,
were rapidly collapsing; garbage piled up in enormous pyramids along
the lanes and even basic civic amenities were conspicuous by their
absence.
Overburdened with a rapidly expanding population, with
only two per cent of the country’s land area inhabitable (the rest
being desert), vast numbers of Egyptians had flooded into Cairo in
recent years. Over half a million of them had made the ancient tombs
in the City of the Dead adjacent to the ‘Islamic City’ their home
where they lived in miserable poverty. Only some isolated parts of
Cairo, such as leafy neighbourhoods across the Nile where the
country’s minuscule elite, many of them tied to the Mubarak regime,
lived, were cheery.
And as for the people, not just in this
part of Cairo but across Egypt, I must confess (at the risk of
political incorrectness) that I found them rude, gruff and aggressive,
with notable exceptions, of course. The country’s dismal economic
conditions may have had something to do with that but I suspect that
this was not the only factor. There were simply not enough jobs for
the ever increasing number of graduates. Prices were skyrocketing
although, unlike India, almost everyone I saw, including hordes of
beggars who thronged outside mosques, seemed reasonably well-fed.
Inequalities were rapidly mounting and the government apparently had
done precious little to address the issue. It was apparent that the
massive amounts of money that America was supplying Egypt to bolster
the Mubarak regime – Egypt is the largest recipient of American aid
after Israel – was certainly not benefiting Egypt’s poor millions.
Rather, most of it was probably spent arming Mubarak’s army, to be
used to quash any dissent, and to prod Egypt to stay at peace with
Israel.
Outside Cairo the situation seemed to be even grimmer.
Berbers in the remote Siwa oasis near the Libyan border complained of
how they were forcibly denied their cultural rights and how the state
was hell-bent on Arabising them in the name of Islam although they
insisted they were better Muslims than the ‘Arab’ Egyptians. The more
visibly ‘African’ Nubians, denizens of largely impoverished ‘upper’
Egypt near the Sudanese frontier, too suffered neglect at the hands of
the government and racial prejudice at the hands of the more Arabised
and politically dominant northerners. Violent attacks on Coptic
Christian churches in the area (two such incidents were reported
during my stay) by suspected Islamist radicals were propelling large
numbers of Copts, who long predated the Muslims in the country, to
flee to Cairo or, preferably, to the West.
The rapid depletion
in the ranks of the country’s religious minorities was having a
devastating impact, I was told by Egyptians concerned at where their
country was heading, on the country’s economy and on its long-standing
progressive traditions, shrinking the liberal space and making the
task of those who wanted Egypt to be ruled in strict accordance with a
literalist reading of the Shariah all the more easy.
That task
was also being impressively assisted by Mubarak’s dreaded repressive
rule. Government informers, I was repeatedly warned, were on the prowl
everywhere. Mubarak had brutally crushed all dissent and I was told to
stay clear of any political discussions with the people I met. Even
mosques, often the refuge of those who have no other space in Muslim
societies to vent their opposition, were tightly controlled by the
government. Mosque imams had to fall in line with state diktats. To
ensure their compliance, they were paid by the state and were thus for
all practical purposes its agents. Their Friday sermons were prepared
by the governmental authorities. Their task was simply to read them
out, whether or not they personally agreed with their contents,
without adding or deleting a dot. If they dared to disobey and spoke
their minds, they easily risked being thrown into prison, branded as
rabble-rousing ‘fundamentalists’.
A young man I met at the
Al-Azhar mosque told me how he was summarily dismissed from his job at
a book booth located inside the mosque simply because he had stocked
some titles other than those strictly prescribed by the authorities.
Islamically assertive men feared to sport beards, for, as some of them
who dared to do so told me, they could easily be branded as
‘fundamentalists’ and be carted off to jail. That explained why even
in Al-Azhar, which churns out would-be ulema in their thousands every
year, almost every student was beardless. The vast majority of them,
like their teachers (widely respected ulema), wore western clothes and
not the flowing ‘Islamic’ djellaba, in many cases not through choice
but rather because of fear. “Muslims have more religious freedom in
your India than here in Egypt,” many an Azharite told me. It was clear
that Mubarak, like many other pro-American Arab dictators, found the
spectre of radical Islamists useful even as he sought to crush it, it
being just the handle he needed to extract crucial western backing for
his hugely unpopular regime by projecting himself as a bulwark against
‘Islamic fundamentalists’.
It was also apparent that as people
grew increasingly restive against Mubarak’s rule, which he had hoped
to turn hereditary by passing the mantle to his son, Islam was
assuming the form of a potent vehicle to articulate opposition to his
regime. The increasing public display of ‘Islamic’ religiosity that I
observed was clearly a form of defiant assertion of identity, a
political statement in the face of a dictatorial regime that was seen
as having bartered away Egyptian, Arab and Muslim interests to its
western overlords.
The much touted ‘Islamic revival’ I
witnessed in Egypt (and I suppose the same could be said of the
phenomenon in much of the rest of the ‘Muslim world’) was deeply
conservative and in many senses frighteningly obscurantist. Hundreds
of ‘private’ mosques, defying the law that sought to place mosques
under close government surveillance, had sprouted up all over the
country. Satellite television had effectively demolished the state’s
monopoly on Islamic discourse, with dozens of ‘Islamic’ channels, many
of them peddling a deeply conservative neo-Wahhabi brand of Islam, now
being beamed into almost every home. Saudi-funded publishing houses
did brisk business, the Islam they advertised being profoundly
supremacist and anti-western but without being politically
revolutionary. The Muslim Brotherhood continued to exercise a
pervasive influence through its many frontal organisations. The hijab
had become so ubiquitous, donned even by women who were not
particularly pious themselves, that it was said that girls and women
without hijab were automatically assumed to be Christians.
All
of these were signs not, I believe, of a sudden mass burst in piety,
as is sometimes alleged by poorly informed journalists, although no
doubt this might have been true in some individual cases. Corruption
and brutality continued undiminished in civil society, even among the
more visibly ‘Islamised’ sectors of it. Becoming more visibly
‘Islamic’ did not necessarily mean becoming more socially engaged or
even more purist when it came to money matters.
To cite a
telling instance, in the vast market just across the street from the
Al-Azhar Seminary, the ‘Islamic’ hub of Cairo, over a hundred smart
shops (scattered among dozens of ‘Islamic’ bookstores) specialised in
shimmering bras and skimpy belly-dance costumes, specimens of which
they slung tantalisingly outside their windows and which adorned rows
of buxom mannequins. Some of these shops were run by veiled women,
others by bearded men with large prayer callouses on their
foreheads. This blatant defiance of Islamic morality had not
sufficiently stirred the ulema and students of Azhar – who, one
supposes, are the backbone of the ‘Islamic’ revival across the country
– to protest. It was not just fear that had forced them into silence
and indifference. It was probably also that such blatant sexism did
not provoke their righteous anger in quite the same way that, say,
hounding ‘heretical’ writers – in which the Azharites have taken a
leading role – has.
The public face of the ‘Islamic’ revival
that was directed against the Mubarak regime (implicitly in some
cases, overtly in the case of underground radical Islamists who have
been subjected to harsh repression), which I saw all around me, was by
no means a positive one even though its target – toppling Mubarak and
his cronies – may have been a laudable objective. The dominant version
of Islam that informed this revival seemed to me to be harsh, fun-less
and punitive and at the same time thoroughly incapable of providing a
progressive alternative to Mubarak’s regime although it definitely had
the potency to challenge it.
It sat in the growls, scowls and
permanent frowns of the vast numbers of men propelling it. It lay in
voluminous tomes and fatwas that prescribed medieval laws for dealing
with contemporary problems. It was definitely anti-intellectual, as
reflected in the enormous number of books I spotted in Cairene
bookstores that (so I learned from an Indian student at Al-Azhar who
translated their titles and tables of contents for me) spoke of Islam
in terms of empty slogans, offering no sensible guidance for running
the affairs of a modern society and economy deeply networked into a
globalised world. It was reflected in graffiti scribbled on street
walls exclaiming in triumph, ‘East or West, Islam is the best’ and
‘Islam is THE solution’. It was also incarnated in waves of bombings
of churches and the growing demonisation of local Christians as
alleged conspirators against Islam.
Mubarak certainly deserved
to go, about that there is no doubt, but as to whether those who will
now replace him, including possibly the Islamists, will prove to be
any better, I am not so sure.
(Yoginder Sikand
works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive
Policy at the National Law School, Bangalore.)
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