How Moderate Islam Is Transforming Egypt

By Geneive Abdo Sunday, November 5, 2000;

When I visited Cairo in September after two years away, Egypt was in one of its periodic political convulsions. Parliamentary elections--during which the state's authoritarian tactics are on full display--were about to take place and, as in previous political seasons, Islamic activists and human rights advocates were running scared. The authorities had banned the only real opposition faction, the Islamic-backed Labor Party, and closed the only voice of public criticism, the newspaper Al Shaabc. An estimated 500 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the country's oldest Islamic organization, had already been imprisoned. All these steps were aimed at silencing the Islamic opposition well ahead of the vote--which began Oct. 18 and will continue until Wednesday--to ensure victory for candidates backed by President Hosni Mubarak's secular government. But while the state's tactics are familiar, the reaction among the political opposition, Islamic activists, human rights activists and society in general is far more rebellious than in the past. This fundamental change had been overlooked by even the most astute Egypt-watchers. But it became clear last month when thousands of Egyptians demonstrated to show their support for the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was a signal that Egyptians, who are generally passive, no longer tolerate the policies of their government as a broker in the Middle East peace process or those of other countries that believe the Oslo accord should be the basis for future negotiations. Egypt's grass-roots Islamic movement--made up of doctors, lawyers, sheiks (or preachers), students, and ordinary men and women--has produced broad-based resistance to the government. After 19 years of living under a state of emergency, which allows Mubarak to rule by decree, Egypt's Islamic movement has finally made inroads toward political and social change. It advocates a society that respects such Islamic values as social justice, modest relations between the sexes and a more equitable relationship with the Christian West. The United States, after relying on Mubarak for two decades as the sole representative of the Egyptian people, would be wise to pay attention to the movement's growing power. It has been 30 years since the emergence of modern Islamic movements, which fall into two basic categories: armed revolutionary groups seeking to impose Islamic rule by force; and "popular" Islamic movements, which are broad-based within societies. Algeria and Afghanistan fall into the former category; Egypt and Turkey represent the latter. The Western world, and the United States in particular, has focused on the threats posed by militant Islam while ignoring the more subtle but profound Islamic transformation in countries such as Egypt. One reason for this oversight is Washington's reluctance to come to know the leaders behind the successful grass-roots religious movements. Like many governments, Washington tends to make no distinction between an Islamic moderate supported by the people, and an Islamic militant who takes power by force. The greatest evidence that the Islamic movement is a player in Egypt's political game came in July, when the Supreme Constitutional Court sided with the movement's long-standing complaint that the country's elections are unfair. The court ruled that judges should monitor polling stations to minimize the possibility of vote rigging. The decree was an embarrassment to the state: Not only did the court presume that the election would be rigged, the implication was that the current parliament is illegitimate. What had prompted the court to take such unprecedented action? According to the judges, it was Egypt's long history of parliaments elected through fraud at the ballot box. The judges' ruling seemed to have an effect in the first two rounds of voting: Six candidates sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood won seats--a sign of the Islamists' increasing penetration into the previously closed political process. When I lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1998, there were signs that Islamic sentiment was creeping into branches of the state. For example, lower courts were banning books and films previously approved by state censors--after sheiks and other religious leaders deemed the works "un-Islamic." Back then, such victories for the Islamic opposition usually came after months of scandal and wrangling with the authorities. Now triumphs against the state are occurring almost without a fight. Al Azhar, a university and mosque complex that is the 1,000-year-old center of learning for Sunni Islam, has taken a leading role in those battles. The head of Al Azhar, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, who was selected by Mubarak to keep the Islamic opposition in check, is instead increasingly siding against the president. This summer, Tantawi pressured Mubarak's government to ban a novel that had cleared state censors, after religious students staged street protests and Islamic activists declared the book blasphemous. Tantawi, jumping on the bandwagon, said the book "insulted the sacred [Islamic] texts." Why is all this happening now in a country known for centuries as being complacent toward foreign invaders, colonialism and its own authoritarian regimes? The reason is significant not only for Egypt, but for other Muslim countries. As Egyptian society has become more religious over the past 30 years, it has demanded more and more from the secular state, such as free and fair elections, and freedom of religious expression. Until the 1980s, Egyptians were willing to tolerate illegal elections, arrests of opposition figures without just charges, torture in prisons and severe restrictions on freedom of expression in the media. It is only in the past decade, with the religious revival well underway, that they have felt they could challenge the state. "Mubarak is finished," one prominent lawyer told me in Cairo earlier this fall, a year into the president's fourth six-year term. "But how can this be when he has been elected again?" I asked. "He is becoming more and more of a figurehead. The will of the people is finally prevailing. You will see more and more resistance from the opposition as well as inside the state structure itself. Everyone has finally had enough." The Islamic movement in Egypt has made far more progress than other opposition movements in the region also battling repressive states--such as Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Morocco. Over the past 10 years, Islamic activists in Egypt have, through democratic elections, taken over professional unions that represent hundreds of thousands of educated middle-class citizens. These unions for much of the past century were controlled by the state. In the mosques, both state-sanctioned and unofficial sheiks increasingly diverge from the state's secularist views on religion and politics. In the universities, only widespread repression prevents Islamist students from victory in campus elections. And, despite persistent efforts by the state to discourage women from wearing veils, a vast and growing majority of women--and even schoolgirls--prefer to conform to Islamic notions of "modest dress" by wearing headscarves. In this, Egypt is not alone. In officially secular Turkey, for example, Necmettin Erbakan was elected prime minister in 1996--the first Islamist to be elected to that post in a democratic poll. Erbakan was head of what was then called the Welfare Party, an Islamic organization with widespread support within the 99 percent Muslim population. In 1997, the military ousted Erbakan--thinking it could extinguish the Islamic flame. But now, three years on, it is clear this strategy won't work in the longer term. This summer, the generals used the same strategy to try to cleanse the Turkish civil service of what they declared was a growing number of "Islamic fanatics." But public outrage prompted Turkey's president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, to declare the witch hunt against civil servants illegal. His poll ratings shot up as a result. A bill to fire Islamist-oriented state employees now sits with parliament. The question remains whether the assembly will side with the public or with the generals. When Erbakan came to power in Turkey, Western governments rejected his pleas to make official state visits to their capitals. He was particularly insulted after he was snubbed by Washington. The United States made no distinction between Erbakan, an Islamist who came to power in a free democratic election, and the Taliban, which now occupies 95 percent of Afghanistan by force and which the United States, like all but three governments worldwide, does not recognize. In the 1990s, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo tried to initiate dialogue with the Islamic activists who had risen to leadership positions in the professional unions. Once Mubarak learned of these contacts, he forced the embassy to abandon the effort. Now, a generation of Islamic leaders in their thirties and forties has become so influential as to sideline Mubarak's powers. These Islamists are moderates, not militants; if they came to power, they say they would impose a moderate application of Islamic law, or sharia. In practice, this means they would allow women to decide for themselves whether to be veiled, unlike in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. They would permit women to continue to work, drive cars and perform other normal activities. And, unlike in Saudi Arabia, they would not advocate cutting off the hands of thieves or gouging out the eyes of other criminals. Rather, they say, they would seek an accommodation between Islam and modernity, not a return to the Medieval Islamic period. They would, however, insist that books and films that do not conform to Islamic principles be banned. But this is in line with the wishes of a majority of Egyptians. Most significantly, Egypt's Islamic leaders say they would hold free and fair elections, which Mubarak's government has failed to accomplish during almost two decades in power. Now is the time for Washington to reconsider its policy toward Mubarak's government, and the billions of dollars in foreign aid it sends Egypt each year. The argument that has driven U.S. policy--that Egypt is a secular and democratic outpost in the volatile Middle East--can no longer be justified. Rather, Egypt has transformed itself almost unnoticed into an Islamic society. And, under Mubarak, it is anything but democratic. During my final days in Cairo last month, I visited a leading Islamic activist who probably would be president if elections were free and fair. Abu al-Ela Mady was a national student leader in the 1970s, when Islamic students were allowed to run in campus elections, a practice which was effectively banned in the 1990s. Mady then went on to lead the influential engineering union, which had hundreds of thousands of members. The union was banned by the state in the mid-1990s because Islamists had been elected to its leadership. A court case is pending over whether it will be allowed to reopen. I asked Mady what the future held for Egypt and the Islamic world. He mentioned that a high-ranking U.S. diplomat had recently paid him a visit but seemed to know little about the Islamic movement that is transforming the country. "Is there any hope the United States will change its views?" I asked. "There is hope only if they are willing to listen and see us for who we really are," he said. For Egyptians, it is the integration of their faith and their society that counts, not a desire to overthrow the government. Is that distinction between moderate and militant Islam not clear enough for Washington? Geneive Abdo is the correspondent in Iran for the Guardian. She is the author of the recently published "No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam" (Oxford University Press). © 2000 The Washington Post Company