The battle for the mind of Egypt

The battle for the mind of Egypt
Jyoti Malhotra travels to Egypt to find that the people have, at least for the t

The call of the muezzin somehow seems subdued across the lanes and bylanes of Cairo. As the traffic flows in organised chaos over the various bridges of the Nile dotted with turn-of-the-century lamps crowned with the distinctive crescent and around the ancient city, the smell of Egypt’s multi-civilisational past rises to envelop the new visitor.

This is Cairo, so take your pick from the monumental sites that rise to meet the skyline from different quarters of the capital representing the Pharaohs, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Ottomans, and most latterly in the 7th century AD, the Arabs who came in from the east. Its they who gave Egypt its very special character, its definitive, Islamic flavour. Until the past intervened, the hoary weight of its centuries mingling with the new religion in a sort of historical osmosis. It gave birth to the new Egyptian, who thought nothing of praying five times a day in his own, personal communion with Allah.

Religion was a private birthright, not a call to arms. Certainly, it wasn’t a thinly-disguised and otherwise commonly used route in most of the Islamic world to the portals of power.

But when extremist groups, fancying themselves to be the only messengers of Allah, attempted to take over that personal space in the last years of the old millennium, a new struggle for Egypt’s identity broke out. As far-right religious groups such as the Gamaat Islamiyya sought to recarve Egypt in its own, conservative image, the laidback population, unused to such strenuous protestations of faith, opened one eye. The writer Naguib Mahfouz Egypt’s permanent first citizen, despite Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak was struck in the neck by a would-be assassin’s knife in 1994, bursting an artery and losing the power of his writing hand. One book, then another, was burnt, their authors charged with apostasy by the fanatic Islamists.

The state struck back, as did a majority of the people, forcing the fanatics to retreat. The faith-pretenders, in fact, broke the back of their own ‘‘revolution’’ in 1997, when 57 tourists were killed outside the temple of an ancient Pharaonic queen in the southern town of Luxor.

Egyptians recoiled in horror. Whatever did religion have to do with violence?Visiting Egypt in this new year, a strange calm seems evident beneath the hum of the traffic. The boat-restaurants on the Nile in Cairo are full of young people jiving to the latest strains of western pop, while the Khan-el-Khalili ‘souk’ or market area in the old part of town panders to people late into the night. Just ask for your favourite brand of alcohol in the restaurant or for the ‘shisha’ (the ‘hookah’) elsewhere and its yours.

Some places even thrust the belly-dance upon you. But turn your head in a split instant and across the cities of Cairo, Luxor and Aswan, you will be confronted with the inevitable, black-uniformed tourist police. They are everywhere, casting their long shadow over the public affairs of men.

So far the ‘‘secularists’’ are winning the battle for Egypt’s mind against the fanatics, but the underlying tension brittle as a paper-thin Egyptian-Indian sesame pancake refuses to go away.

At the Al-Azhar mosque, the keeper of the Islamic faith for at least a thousand years since the Fatimids built this utterly beautiful structure, deputy Sheikh Mahmud Ashour is dismissive of hardline, fundamentalist regimes like the Taliban in Afghanistan. ‘‘We issued an appeal to stop the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan because it is part of our human heritage. Islam respects the creeds and beliefs of others. When Islam came to Egypt in the 7th century, there was the Sphinx, the Pyramids, the monuments of the Pharaohs at Luxor, but not a single one was destroyed, because such destruction is against the spirit of Islam. The destruction at Bamiyan was very extremist behaviour and gave a very bad name to Islam,’’ he said.

At the other end of the spectrum is the political adviser to the all-powerful president, the utterly sophisticated Osama El-Baz (his smart secretary, who speaks at least three languages, prominently wears a cross around her neck), who points out that a secular system of education in primary school has recently been introduced so as to teach tolerance. ‘‘There may be opposition to this, but we know that we have to produce a system of education that produces free minds free of fanaticism. Egypt accepts diversity, we cannot condemn the other of being an infidel simply because he is different,’’ he added.

And yet, the middle ground hasn’t completely been won. The niggling feeling, that the state has compromised with the conservative crowd in order to diminish the strength of the fringe, refuses to go away. Al-Azhar’s influence, for example, has grown in leaps and bounds across the country, opening up branches everywhere, enlarging the number of its own departments from 9 in the 1950s to 65 today. The deputy sheikh proudly says the government must take Al-Azhar’s advice before passing major pieces of legislation.

Osama El-Baz avers that it would be a mistake, just like many Westerners tend to do, to confuse the deeply religious Egyptian with his fundamentalist colleague. Young women, for example, covering their heads with a scarf are compromising with tradition as well as fashion, he explains. And yet, much like his younger colleague, the government spokesman Nabil Osman, El-Baz doesn’t hesitate to point out that Egypt’s limited political democracy is not only best for the country, but makes for effective control over such fundamentalist groups as well. ‘‘Egypt has had a stable, centralised government for four thousand years, we don’t like to think in terms of experiments.’’

Osman goes one step further, pointing out that while the government will not hesitate in enforcing a strict egalitarianism in the social sphere (‘‘we’re not a quota society’’), tampering with religion is out of bounds. The ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is justified, he argues, because it deals with religious motifs and ‘‘religion is a dangerous card to play’’.

This is Egypt, then, an amalgam of contradictions, a historical melting-pot of ideas, still struggling five thousand years after the Sphinx, to define itself. Once a leader of the Non-Aligned world with Nasser at its helm, the new world order has thrown a veritable gauntlet to Egypt. Leader of the Arab world? Maker of peace with former enemy, Israel? Demanding membership in the cosetted world of Mediterranean nations? America’s friend in the Islamic world? Straddling these spheres like a modern-day Vishnu, Egypt allows you the freedom of answers.For a start, though, it reverses with consummate ease the old Herodotus saying that ‘‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile.’’ It is the Nile, across whose bridges the crescent-topped evening lamps glow with such warmth, that gift-wraps this unusual nation.