Introduction

But at the time of Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem a more extreme Muslim sect had come to light. Its leaders were standing trial for the murder of Muhammad al-Dhahabi, a distinguished religious scholar and former government minister. Egyptians were shocked to hear these young Muslims declare that Islam had been in decline since the era of the first four “rightly guided” (rashidun) caliphs, that all Islamic developments since that time were nothing but idolatry, and that the whole of Egypt, including the president and the religious establishment, belonged to the jahiliyyah. The sect declared that thisjahi/i society must be destroyed and a truly Muslim society based on the Koran and the Sunnah built on its ruins. God had chosen Shukri Mustafa, the founder of the sect, to create a new law and to put Muslim history back on the straight path.
Shukri had been arrested and imprisoned by Nasser’s regime in 1965, when he was twenty-three years old, for distributing the leaflets of the Society of Muslim Brothers. For this paltry offense, he had spent six years in Nasser’s camps, reading Mawdudi and Qutb, and, like many of the younger Brothers, he was drawn to their ideas. In the prisons, these more extreme Muslims practiced the strict segregation demanded by Qutb. They withdrew from the other inmates and the older, more moderate Brothers, declaring that they werejahili. Some, however, decided to keep their views secret.
Qutb had believed that it would be a long time before his vanguard were ready to begin a jihad against jahili society. First they must go through the first three stages of the Muhammadan program, and prepare themselves spiritually. Some of the young extremists in the prisons, therefore, agreed that they were currently in a state of “weakness” and in no position to challenge the evil regime. For the time being they would continue to live a normal life in the jahiliyyah until the time was ripe. Shukri, however, belonged to the more ardent group which advocated “total separation” (mufsalah kamilah): anybody who did not join their sect was an infidel and true believers could have nothing to do with him. They would refuse to speak to their fellow prisoners, and there were frequent fistfights.
When Shukri was released from the Abu Zabal camp on October 16, 1971, he founded a new group which he called the Society of Muslims. Members were convinced that they were Qutb’s vanguard and dedicated themselves to fulfilling his program. Accordingly, they withdrew from mainstream society to prepare for the jihad. Since the whole of Egyptian society was corrupt, they refused to worship in the mosques and pronounced the edict of excommunication (takfir) upon the religious and secularist establishment alike.
Some migrated to the deserts and mountain caves around Asyut, Shukri’s hometown. Most lived in furnished rooms in the poorest and most deprived neighborhoods on the outskirts of the large cities, where they tried to live a truly Islamic life. By 1976, the Society of Muslims had about two thousand members, men and women, who were convinced that God had chosen them to build a pure ummah on the ruins of the present jahiliyyah. They were in God’s hands. Now that they had taken the initiative, God would do the rest.
The police kept a watchful eye on the Society, but dismissed them as harmless cranks and dropouts. But if Sadat and his advisers had bothered to look at the lives of these young, desperate fundamentalists, they might have seen that these Muslim communes were a reverse image of the Open Door policy and reflected the shadow side of modern Egypt.
Shukri’s excommunication of the whole of Egyptian society may have been extreme, but it was not wholly without foundation. However many mosques were built in Sadat’s Egypt, there was nothing Islamic about a nation in which wealth was commandeered by a small elite while the majority languished in hopeless poverty. The hijrah or “migration” which members of the Society made to the most desperate neighborhoods of the cities also demonstrated the plight of so many young Egyptians, who felt that there was no place for them in Egypt, that they had been pushed out of their own country. The Society’s communes were maintained by young men whom Shukri sent to the Gulf states, like so many other Egyptian youths.
Many members of the Society had received a university education, but Shukri declared that all secular learning was a waste of time; all a Muslim needed was the Koran. This was another extreme position, but there was a grain of truth in it. The education that many Egyptians were receiving during the 1970s was entirely useless to them. Not only were the teaching and methods of study grossly inadequate, but a university degree did not even ensure that a graduate would get a decent job: a lady’s maid in a foreign household was likely to earn more than an assistant university professor.
As long as the Society kept a low profile, the regime left them alone.
But in 1977 Shukri broke his cover. In November 1976, rival Islamic groups had enticed some members of the Society away and, in Shukri’s eyes, these defectors had become apostates worthy of death. His disciples launched a series of raids against them and, as a result, fourteen members of the Society were arrested for attempted homicide. Shukri immediately went on the offensive. For the first six months of 1977, he campaigned for the release of his colleagues, sending articles to the newspapers and trying to broadcast on radio and television. When these peaceful methods failed, Shukri resorted to violence. On July 7, he kidnapped Muhammad al-Dhahabi, who had written a pamphlet denouncing the Society as heretical. The day after the kidnapping, Shukri published a communique in three Egyptian newspapers, as well as in several other Muslim countries, New York, Paris, and London. He demanded the immediate release of his disciples, insisted on a public apology for the negative press the Society had received in the media, and requested the setting up of a committee to investigate the legal system and intelligence services of the regime. There was no chance that Sadat would permit any discussion of the methods of his secret police: Shukri clearly did not understand the nature of the state that he had defied.
When Dhahabi’s body was discovered a few days later, Shukri and hundreds of his disciples were arrested. After a swift trial, Shukri himself and five of the leading members of the Society were executed.
The press called the sect Takfir wal Hijrah (“Excommunication and Migration”), because of its rejectionist and condemnatory ideology.
Like so much fundamentalist theology, it sprang from the experience of rage and marginalization, but Shukri’s story reminds us that it is not always accurate to condemn such a movement as merely lunatic.
Unbalanced and tragically mistaken as he was, Shukri had created a counterculture that mirrored the darker side of Sadat’s new Egypt, which was being hailed with such enthusiasm in the West. It revealed in a distorted, exaggerated form what was really going on, and expressed the alienation experienced by so many young Egyptians in a country which they no longer felt to be their own.
Just as revealing, but more successful and enduring, were thejamaat alislamiyyah, the Islamist student associations which dominated the university campuses during the presidency of Sadat. Like Shukri’s Society, thejamaat saw themselves as Qutb’s vanguard; however, they did not practice a radical withdrawal from the mainstream, but tried to create an Islamic space for themselves in a society that seemed oblivious to their needs. Egyptian universities were not like Oxford, Harvard, or the Sorbonne. They were huge, heartless, mass institutions with lamentably poor facilities. Between 1970 and 1977, the number of students rose from about 200,000 to half a million.
As a result, there was appalling overcrowding. Two or three students would have to share a seat, and the lecture halls and laboratories were so packed that it was virtually impossible to hear the teacher’s voice, especially since the microphones were often broken. The overcrowding was especially difficult for women students, many of whom had come from a traditional back ground and found it intolerable to be crammed up against young men on the benches or in the buses that conveyed the students back to their equally crowded halls of residence. Learning was by rote and success in the examinations required the mechanical regurgitation of the lecture notes and manuals issued by the professors. The humanities, law, and the social sciences were known as “garbage faculties,” and virtually written off. Whatever their personal inclinations, able students would be forced to study medicine, pharmacology, odontology, engineering, or economics, or else resign themselves to being taught by the worst professors and to having even less chance of a reasonable job after graduation. In this setting, the students were not trained to think creatively about the problems of humanity or of society.
Instead, they were required to absorb information passively and soullessly.
Their introduction to modern culture was chronically superficial, therefore, and left their religious beliefs and practices entirely untouched.
The jamaat produced few books or pamphlets, but an article written for al-Dawah in 1980 by Isam al-Din al-Aryan sums up their main ideas.
Sayyid Qutb was clearly an inspiration; the jamaat believed that it was time for Egyptians to shake off the Western and Soviet ideologies that had dominated the country for so long, and return to Islam. Egypt was still in effect controlled by infidels, and there could be no true independence unless there was a great religious awakening. The jamaat did not confine themselves to the discussion of ideas, but applied the Islamic ideology creatively and practically to their own circumstances.
In 1973, the students began to set up summer camps in the major universities. They studied the Koran, prayed together at night, and listened to sermons about the Golden Age of Islam, the career of the Prophet, and the four rashidun. By day, there were sporting activities and classes in self-defense. For a few weeks, the students lived, thought, and played in a wholly Islamic setting. It was, in a sense, a temporary hijrah, a migration from mainstream society to a world where they could live out the Koran and experience for themselves its impact on their lives. They learned what it was like to live in an environment which really did endorse the teachings of scripture. The camps gave them a taste of an Islamic Utopia, in marked contrast to the in authentically Muslim life of the regime. Preachers and speakers discussed the bitter disappointment of the modern experiment, which may have worked beautifully in Europe or America, but which only worked to the advantage of the rich in Egypt.
When they returned to university life, students tried to reproduce some of this experience on campus. They set up a minibus service for women students, to spare them the harassment they frequently suffered on public transport. They insisted on the segregation of the sexes in separate rows in the lecture halls for the same reason, and also advocated the wearing of Islamic dress for both men and women. The long, concealing robes were more practical in a traditional society, which did not look kindly upon Western-style dating, and where (since marriage, for economic reasons, was not an option) sexual frustration was a major problem for Egyptian youth.
Thejamaat also organized revision sessions in the mosques, where students could study quietly in a way that was impossible in the noisy, overcrowded halls of residence. These policies were effective. A student might wear traditional dress or join a segregated row in a lecture hall simply to avoid embarrassment, in the first instance, but at the same time she would become aware that the regime was less concerned for her well-being than the cadre of jamaat. By leaving his turbulent dormitory to study in a mosque, a student had made a small, symbolic hijrah, and learned that an Islamic setting worked far better for him. Many of the students had come from rural backgrounds and a traditional, premodern society. Not only did they experience modernity in the university as alien, impersonal, and bewildering, but they were given no other intellectual tools to enable them to criticize the regime in the course of their mediocre education. Many would find that in this world, only Islam made sense.
Western observers were particularly dismayed by the spectacle of women returning to the veil, which they had seen as a symbol of Islamic backwardness and patriarchy since the days of Lord Cromer. But it was not experienced in this way by those Muslim women who voluntarily assumed Islamic dress for practical reasons and also as a way of casting off an alien Western identity. Donning a veil, a scarf, and a long dress could be a symbol of that “return to the self” which Islamists were attempting with such difficulty in the postcolonial period. There is, after all, nothing sacred about Western dress per se. The desire to see all women wearing it has been construed by Islamists as a sign of that tendency to regard “the West” as the norm to which “the rest” are obliged to conform. The veiled woman has, over the years, become a symbol of Islamic self-assertion and a rejection of Western cultural hegemony. Opting for concealment, she defies the sexual mores of the West, with its strange compulsion to “reveal all.”
Where Western men and women attempt to bring the body under the control of the human will in their gyms and workouts, and cling to this life by making their bodies impervious to the process of time and ageing, the veiled Islamic body tacitly declares that it is under divine orders and oriented not toward this world but to transcendence. In the West, men and women often display and even flaunt their expensively acquired tans and finely honed bodies as a mark of privilege; Muslim bodies, concealed under layers of very similar clothing, emphasize the equality of the Islamic vision. By the same token, they assert the Koranic ideal of community over the individualism of Western modernity. In rather the same way as Shukri Mustafa’s communes, the veiled Islamic woman is a tacit critique of the darker side of the modern spirit.
A woman who decided to wear Islamic dress had not necessarily reverted to the old female submission of pre modernity A survey conducted in Egypt in 1982 showed that while veiled women were generally more conservative than those who preferred Western clothes, a remarkably high proportion of the Islamists held progressive views on gender issues. Eighty-eight percent of veiled women believed that women’s education was important (as opposed to 93 percent of the unveiled); 88 percent of the veiled women thought it acceptable for women to work outside the home, and 77 percent of them intended to work after graduation (compared with 95 and 85 percent respectively of the unveiled). The gap was larger in other areas, but a majority of veiled women (53 percent) still believed that men and women should have the same political rights and duties, and that women should be able to occupy the highest positions in the state (63 percent). Only 38 percent of the veiled women thought that men and women should be equal in marriage, but only 66 percent of the unveiled women believed in marital equality. It is also interesting that a majority of both veiled (67 percent) and unveiled (52.7 percent) believed that the Shariah should be the law of the land.
It is true that, like all premodern law, the Shariah reduces women to a secondary, inferior position. But, as Leila Ahmed points out in Women and Gender in Islam, these women were attempting to return, like so many Muslim reformers of the past, to the “true Islam” of the Koran and the Sunnah, rather than to the medieval fiqh of al-Azhar. They believed that “true Islam” preached equality and justice to all, women included. But Ahmed agrees that they could be vulnerable to co option by the patriarchal establishment, and notes that when an Islamic regime comes to power, this has generally led to a deterioration in the status of women. When things are not going well, it is easy to quell incipient discontent by giving males more control over their women.
Nevertheless, it remains true that Islamic dress does not always indicate a submissive female heart. The Turkish scholar Nilufar Gole argues that veiled women are often militant, outspoken, and well-educated. Many veiled women took an active and sometimes a heroic role in the new fundamentalist offensive.
Ahmed also points out that in Egypt, Islamic dress is not a return to the past. There was nothing traditional about the clothes that many women preferred in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a new fashion, resembling Western styles (apart from the long sleeves and skirts) rather than the garb worn by their grandmothers. Indeed, it could be seen as a “halfway house” and as the uniform of transition to modern society. More and more women than ever before had started to receive a higher education during these years. A large number of the women who opted for Islamic dress in the universiies were among the first members of their family to have advanced beyond basic literacy; they often came from a rural background. Their dress was, therefore, a “modern” version of the clothes worn by the women in their family. When they encountered the alarming modernity of the big city-its cosmopolitanism, aggressive consumerism, inequalities, violence, and overcrowding--they could easily have been overcome. Their dress proclaimed their upward mobility, but it also provided some continuity with what they had worn before. An Islamic identity and the community that went with it enabled them to make what could have been a traumatic rite of passage more easily and peacefully. We have seen that in the past, religion has helped people to cross over from a conventional to a more modern lifestyle and ideology. Islamic dress, for both men and women, could be another of these stratagems.
All transitions are painful, however. The is.micjamaat on the campuses during the late 1970S was a youth movement which helped young men and women to articulate their frustration and confusion. It often spilled over into violence. The jamaat were the least aggressive of the Egyptian Islamic movements during the 1970S, but some of the more militant leaders would resort to strong-arm tactics on occasion to get control of the campus.
The American Arabist Patrick Gaffney made a study of the Jamaah alIslamiyyah at the new University of Minya in Upper Egypt, where the student body was still undeveloped and the small Islamic cadre had few rivals.
They began by establishing special places as Islamic zones: a bulletin board, a section of the cafeteria, or the shady spots on lawns. By 1977, by dint of bullying to deter rivals, the Islamists had gained control of the student union. They made a mosque in the shared grounds of the Colleges of Art and Education, where students had to congregate between classes. The Islamists took the place over, spreading prayer mats, amplifying the prayers over a loudspeaker, and bearded youths occupied the area at all times, studying the Koran.
This aggressive encroachment into secular space can be seen as a crude attempt to reconstruct Islam and implant it in a Westernized world. The Islamists of Minya refused to accept the universal expansion of Western civilization and were trying to change the map. Like the adoption of Islamic dress, the conversion of a profane space into a mosque constituted a rebellion against a wholly secularized way of life. For almost a century, Egyptians, like other people in the developing world, had been deemed incapable of creating history and establishing a modern society on their own terms.
Now the Islamists were making something happen, on however small a scale. They were protesting against the centrality of the Western viewpoint, and pushing their own out of the margins and into the limelight once more.
Like the civil rights or ethnic movements, like feminism or environmentalism, the student Muslim organizations were struggling to reassert an identity, values and issues which they felt had been repressed by industrial modernity, and to emphasize the vitality of the local and particular over against the uniformity of the global society imposed by the West. Like other postmodern movements, it was an act of symbolic decolonization, an attempt to de-center the West, and demonstrate the fact that there were other possibilities for humanity.
As Sadat moved ever closer to the West and made peace with Israel (which was regarded by Islamists as the alter ego of America in the Middle East), a rupture with the regime became almost inevitable. At Minya the students became more violent. They vandalized churches, attacked students who refused to wear Islamic dress, and, in February 1979, occupied the municipal government building for a week. When the police closed down one of their mosques, the students held the Friday community prayer in the middle of the street on an important bridge, holding up traffic. Next they took over University City, the student resident block, and held thirty Christian students as hostages. Two days later, a thousand troops arrived to quell the uprising.
Until 1977, Sadat had supported the jamaat al-islamiyyah, but the events at Minya changed his mind. On April 14, 1979, he visited Upper Egypt and addressed the faculties of the Universities of Minya and Asyut: the government would no longer tolerate this abuse of religion.
In June, the General Union of Egyptian Students was banned, and its assets were frozen. But the jamaat were too strongly entrenched to disappear. At the end of the Ramadan fast, they held huge rallies in the major cities of Egypt. In Cairo, fifty thousand Muslims gathered in prayer outside the presidential Abidin Palace, tacitly reminding Sadat that he must rule according to God’s law.
The distinguished Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi was flown in from the Gulf to address the crowds. He reminded Sadat, who was currently devoting much attention to the preservation of the mummy of Ramses
II:
Egypt is Muslim, not pharaonic ... the youth of the jamaat islamiyyah are the true representatives of Egypt, and not the Avenue of the Pyramids, the theatre performances, and the films.... Egypt is not naked women, but veiled women who adhere to the prescriptions of divine law. Egypt is young men who let their beards grow.... It is the land of al-Azhar!
Repression and coercion had their usual effect. The Islamist students now redoubled their efforts to turn the campuses into Islamic bastions;
there were more attacks on cinemas, theaters, Christians, and unveiled women.
They also began to spread the word outside the universities. There was now a state of open warfare against the regime and its secularized ethos. The jamaat were not allowed to regroup, and many of their members joined the new secret cells dedicated to a more violent jihad.
These events all took place against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution.
While Sadat, in his attempt to draw closer to the West, spoke proudly of the shah as his friend, Islamic militants in Egypt gloried in the reports of the Iranian revolutionaries who were bringing the shah down.
The Iranian Revolution of 1978--79 was a watershed. It was an inspiration to thousands of Muslims all over the world, who had long felt that their religion was under attack. Khomeini’s victory showed that Islam was not destined for destruction; it could take on powerful secularist forces and win. But the Revolution filled many in the West with horror and dismay. Barbarism seemed to have triumphed over Enlightenment. For many committed secularists, Khomeini and Iran would come to typify all that was wrong--and even evil--in religion, not least because the Revolution revealed the hatred that so many Iranians felt for the West in general and America in particular.
In the early 1970S, Iran seemed to be booming. American investors and the Iranian elite alike both made a great deal of money out of the new businesses and industries created by the White Revolution. The American embassy in Tehran, far from being a center of espionage (as the revolutionaries would claim) was more like a brokerage center to put rich Americans in touch with rich Iranians. But--again--it was only the elite that benefited.