by Kim Ghattas
At Al-Azhar, faced with the hectoring sheikh, a tense Ahmadinejad interjected several times, before signaling he would walk away if the lecture continued. Sheikh al-Shafie ended on a more conciliatory note, calling for unity, to which Ahmadinejad smiled broadly and said in Arabic: ahsant, ahsant, well done, well done.
Geopolitics had clearly obliterated all sense of history in Egypt. No one even mentioned Al-Azhar’s own Shia past. The religious institution dated back to the Fatimids, the fourth Islamic caliphate and a Shia dynasty that ruled from the tenth to the twelfth century over a territory extending from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. They were the descendants of Fatima, daughter of the prophet and wife of Ali. This was the only and last time since Ali’s own brief rule in 656 that direct descendants of the prophet had ruled as an Islamic caliphate, and therefore the only time that the caliph and the religious leadership had been one. One of the first universities in the world, Al-Azhar was first built as a center of Shia learning and named in honor of Fatima, who was known as al-Zahraa’, the brilliant. Cairo itself had been built by the Fatimids as their new capital in 970. The Fatimid reign was one of flourishing arts and abundant scholarly works. There were no forced conversions to Shiism, but a tolerance for minorities that left a lasting pluralistic legacy. When Saladin defeated the Fatimids in 1170, Al-Azhar was shut down for over a century and Sunni Islam became the state religion once again. Centuries later, in the land of the pharaohs, Islam still stood at the intersection of Sunnism and Shiism; on a popular level, for centuries, and until the very recent past, there had been no divide between them. But for a few decades now, just as in Pakistan, there had been efforts to curb the mawleds in Egypt, the colorful, exuberant celebrations of the birthdays of saints and the prophet. Some of this was the result of state-led efforts to organize the chaotic festivities, or even of Sufi-led reforms, but many Egyptians attributed the changes to the influence of Saudi puritanism.
Ebtehal and her late husband echoed what most thought when they said that Egyptians were Sunni in their faith but Shia in their culture and temperament, and she resented what she described as Saudi cultural diktats. Perhaps those sentiments scared the Saudis at this delicate time in the region, a time of chaotic uprisings from Egypt to Syria and Bahrain, chaos behind which Saudi Arabia saw the hand of Iran and the specter of 1979. Iranians were aggressively courting Egypt, and Ahmadinejad’s fiasco at Al-Azhar did not deter them.
Barely two days after Ahmadinejad’s visit, Morsi received a letter from seventeen Iranian scholars and officials calling on him to draw on the experience of Iran and impose full shari’a rule in Egypt. The Iranians were offering their experience and knowledge. The media coverage of the letter reflected either Saudi Arabia’s deep insecurity or its willful agitation of anti-Iran feelings. The Saudi-run pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat was the first to publish the letter, claiming it was signed by the Supreme Leader. The letter, according to the newspaper, called on Morsi to implement a wilayat al-faqih in Egypt and to join Iran in building a great new Islamic civilization. Egyptian newspapers quickly repeated the claim, causing furious reactions in Egypt, including from within the Muslim Brotherhood. Iran denied the letter was signed by Khamenei and denied it had made any reference to wilayat al-faqih, threatening to sue Asharq al-Awsat. But the seed of doubt had been planted.
Saudi Arabia’s fear of Iran and its obsession with conversions to the Shia faith predated Egypt’s revolution and Morsi’s election. The Saudis, quietly but methodically, had been keeping an eye on Iran’s every move there, just as they had been doing in Pakistan, and they would only build further on this: their counterrevolution would be sectarian, an upgraded version of the anti-Shia, anti-Iran rhetoric Saudi Arabia had helped spread in the 1980s. The money spent would be vast and the results deadly. The kingdom had an ally of convenience in its endeavors, the United Arab Emirates—a small country with the ambitions of a big military power and a staunch ally of the United States.
In 2008 and 2009, the Saudi ambassador was already sending cables to Riyadh detailing Egypt’s concerns about how Iran was courting Egyptians through cultural and religious exchanges. In another cable, the ambassador alerted Riyadh to Iran’s efforts to “infiltrate” Al-Azhar. The institution had opened its doors to Shia students from Lebanon in 2007 and was responding favorably to an Iranian suggestion to open an Azhari institute in Iran and to welcome students from Iran to Al-Azhar in Egypt.
By 2012, a year after the fall of Mubarak, the tone of the Saudi diplomatic missives had become more alarmist. The Saudi intelligence services were reporting to higher-ups about the “Shia movement” in Egypt, which they claimed was enjoying newfound freedom in post-revolution Egypt, demanding more space to practice their faith, a bigger say in the writing of the constitution, and the right to form a party. Al-Azhar was apparently also sounding the alarm: it shared its concern with Saudi diplomats and asked for help to counter Iran’s alleged proselytizing. The number of Shias in the country was hotly debated—most experts put it at several hundred thousand; the state had a more inflated number of one or two million. Even that was minuscule in a country of 90 million, and no amount of conversions could really qualify as a national security threat.
Sheikh al-Tayyeb of Al-Azhar had publicly and forcefully spoken about the dangers of the “rising Shia surge, in the land of Sunnis, in the vicinity of the minaret of Al-Azhar.” In May 2012, Al-Azhar launched a campaign to warn against the dangers of conversions to Shiism, with pamphlets, conferences, and lectures in youth clubs.
There was no doubt that the 1980s—with the Iran-Iraq War and alleged Iranian plots to provoke unrest in Egypt—had colored how official Egypt, as opposed to popular Egypt, dealt with its Shia minority, harassing and imprisoning them to the point where Mubarak had declared, in 2005, that Shias could only be loyal to Iran—a fifth column. This was a Saudi line par excellence. Were Al-Azhar’s fears in 2012 founded? Were they the result of Saudi whisperings in the ears of its sheikhs and years of carefully cultivating the institution? Either way, Al-Azhar’s campaign against Shiism was having an impact—an inadvertently violent one.
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In the early days of summer 2013, anti-Shia posters went up in the small town of Abu Musallam, twenty miles south of Cairo. They were signed by a Salafist organization under the headline THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE SHIA SURGE. In their sermons, the town’s clerics denounced the Shias as unbelievers. A procession went through the town, clerics and young men brimming with rage and screaming “No to the Shias.” A few weeks later, on June 23, Shia townsmen gathered in the privacy of one of their homes to celebrate a mawled. One of their guests was a well-known cleric, Hassan Shehata, a former Sunni imam for the Egyptian army. Shehata was a rare example of someone who had converted to Shiism in the 1990s and become a vocal critic of Saudi-style Salafism and Wahhabism.
A mob started gathering around the house in the afternoon, dozens and then hundreds, hurling stones at the house, then Molotov cocktails, calling Shehata’s name. They scaled the walls, climbed onto the roof of the two-story house, and tore a hole through its flimsy concrete ceiling. Hoping to calm the crowd and save those inside the house, including women and young children, Shehata came out, followed by three others. But the rage of the crowd overpowered them. The mob beat them with metal rods, threw them to the ground, stomped on them, tied their hands, and dragged them through the streets. The police arrived eventually. The four men were already dead.
Where did that blind hatred come from?
On Wesal television, they celebrated Shehata’s violent death with glee. Wesal TV was one of the many virulently sectarian satellite channels that had sprung up in the decade since the Iraq War. There were some one hundred twenty religious stations across the region and an estimated twenty of them were spouting anti-Shia or anti-Sunni vitriol. Wesal TV was Sunni, operating out of Saudi Arabia and trying to build a Salafist media empire with news channels in various languages, some of which broadcast out of London. Its stated goal was “t
o expose the Safavid enterprise,” a euphemism for Iran.
Abdulrahman Dimashqieh, a Lebanese Salafist preacher with a minor following, was a guest on one of the channel’s talk shows to comment on Shehata’s death. “I’m very happy he died, he deserved it … Of course, we don’t approve of the way he was killed, we didn’t call for his killing … But I’m joyful. I’m not simply satisfied with God’s justice having been carried out, I’m joyful,” Dimashqieh told the show’s host. Then he looked straight into the camera and smiled. “I’m joyful.”
“Praise be to God,” said the anchor. This was a typical answer, denying any responsibility for creating the atmosphere in which the killing had become permissible while signaling clearly that it was halal, permissible by religion. In the bottom left corner of the screen, the words “Iran is killing our brothers” flashed under a small Iranian flag, which fluttered and then tore in half.
In 2017, nine men would be sentenced to fourteen years in jail for Shehata’s murder. But Egypt had crossed into dark territory. For Ebtehal, as for most Egyptians, it was incomprehensible. She saw the rise of sectarian hatred as a direct result of Saudi influence and politics “This is not our fight,” she kept saying. Saudi Arabia left no one indifferent. Its checkbook diplomacy, its influence and power, real or imagined, was either praised or deeply resented. There were grand statements about how the whole of Al-Azhar had become a Wahhabi institution, claims that every mosque in Egypt received funding from Saudi Arabia and that every Quran reciter had adopted the purposely monotonous, joyless Saudi-style cadence. The statements were sweeping and often uninformed, but they reflected how many Egyptians had come to view Saudi intentions: negative and nefarious.
The Saudis and the Emiratis were busy working behind the scenes with the army to help bring about Morsi’s downfall. Morsi was only helping, by accumulating mistakes and pushing for extraordinary presidential powers, immunity, and a constitution with strong Islamist tenets. The people began to turn on him. The revolutionaries of Tahrir Square had not signed up for a power grab by an Islamist. On June 30, millions of Egyptians took to the street, clamoring for Morsi’s departure. Ahmed was among them. His father was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but Ahmed had long ago rejected religion and he wanted Morsi out. The army was poised, egging on the protesters, flying its jets overheard in support. The military coup could now be depicted as a response to the will of the people.
The Saudis and the Emiratis cheered when Morsi was overthrown, on July 3, 2013. They quickly pledged $8 billion in cash and loans to help the transitional government. The crackdown on Morsi supporters protesting the coup a month later was bloodier than any past repression of the Brotherhood, bloodier than anything anyone had seen: at least 817 protesters dead, the largest killing of demonstrators in a single day in recent history, anywhere in the world, surpassing the estimated toll of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Ahmed’s father, a doctor, had been there, too—the family had frantically searched for him, but he escaped the bloodbath unscathed. He was shocked to find that in his village, he was now being shunned by neighbors and friends, people whose children he had attended to as a doctor. Society was turning on itself.
Morsi and most of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership ended up in jail, hundreds of its members sentenced to die in the course of the following year. In 2019, after six years of solitary confinement and inadequate health care, Morsi would collapse during a court hearing and die from cardiac arrest. The organization was banned. Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Sissi, friend of Saudi Arabia and once a military attaché at the Egyptian embassy in Saudi Arabia, oversaw the crackdown. He was elected president in May 2014.
The power of the people was buried under the rubble—not dead, but barely alive. Cairo was still hell, a city where, in Ahmed’s futuristic, fantastical novel, “life is one long wait, and the smell of trash and assorted animal dung hangs about all the time and everywhere … Cairo’s not what you’d expect from a city of its size. In spite of its teeming millions, this is a city that is hopelessly repressed. A coalition of social, political, and religious taboos conspire to keep everything that ferments in the city’s underbelly from rising to the surface.” Ahmed had written Using Life before the revolution, before the rage rose to the surface, but the book was published in the summer of 2014, by which time the rage had come to naught. The action was set in modern-day Cairo, but a Cairo that had been eviscerated by sandstorms, which had also killed millions and even subsumed the pyramids into sinkholes. Ahmed never mentions Mubarak, Morsi, or Sissi, but his novel is about the dueling instincts of inertia and rage that propelled young Egyptians to the streets and then forced them to retreat.
The protagonist’s sexual encounters with his older girlfriend Mona are described in explicit, lightly erotic detail, there’s a lot of hash smoking, and the conversations are laced with crude words, the same way they litter the everyday sentences of many Arabs, except the most devout ones. “You’re nothing but a cocksucker among cocksuckers. Quit the drama, little one, and enough blaming yourself. In the end, it’s not so bad to be a cocksucker in Cairo. Just relax and take it all in.” Inertia in a riotous novel, one that unexpectedly landed Ahmed in jail.
The book had been approved by the censors before publication—perhaps his metaphors about modern-day Egypt were beyond their grasp. Most of them were familiar with every curse word on the pages. But an excerpt, published in the Akhbar al-Adab literary review magazine where Ahmed worked, had made its way into the home of a prudish citizen, who claimed that upon reading the sexually explicit language, his heartbeat had faltered and he had keeled over. Just as in Nasr Abu Zeid’s apostasy case in the 1990s, here was a private citizen coming forward as a censor, this time as a guardian of society’s morals. Ahmed didn’t expect a sentencing and was initially acquitted. But in February 2016, the case came alive again mysteriously, and an appeals court sentenced him to two years in jail. Thanks to the prowess of his legal team, he was released early, after ten months of shivering cold and sweats, of cockroaches and humiliation—but he remained embroiled in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic limbo, forbidden from leaving the country for unknown, unknowable reasons.
Ahmed was comforted by the support he received from fellow writers and artists—650 of them had signed a petition calling for his release. Former officials spoke in his favor, even the policeman taking him to court told him he didn’t deserve the sentence. If Nasr had been tried today, thought Ahmed, he too would have received a flood of support. Perhaps the trial would have ended differently, perhaps he wouldn’t even have been exiled. Cairo may have been a hell in Ahmed’s novel, but in today’s Egypt he could actually publish it and be supported for doing so. There were no death threats—though admittedly he had not written about religion.
Ebtehal saw things very differently. There was a generational divide; the bar of expectations about quality of life and space for freedom of expression had been lowered almost to the ground. The vigorous debates of her youth about the role of religion in society were shut down the day she and Nasr got on a plane to Europe. The rise of religion had pervaded all aspects of cultural and social life. Just as Mehtab saw it in the small details in Pakistan, Ebtehal felt it here: the call to prayer as mobile phone ringtones; the recordings of the traveler’s prayer in elevators; the aggressive, violent harassment of women on the streets. As a young woman in the 1960s, her own mother had walked the streets of Cairo in a skirt and short sleeves and no one had batted an eyelid.
Ahmed’s generation had no memory of those days, of the social and political plurality of the past, the plethora of choices; they had come of age in the 1990s with the constant din of religion dominating the debate. For them, it felt as though space was finally opening up for more debate, that the future could still be a more progressive place. Ahmed’s book had been approved by the censors. He had been released early. The young writer saw the Muslim Brotherhood rise to power and fail, its aura finally burst by the reality of governing. He saw women removing the veil, disi
llusioned by religion; he saw women waiting on him in cafés late at night. If Ebtehal felt that the past was another country, Ahmed saw a different, better future in the making.
And so he often wondered: Had he really ended up in jail because he had written about cocks and pussies—or was it because of his columns? Ahmed had strong opinions about Saudi Arabia, and he didn’t hide them. The kingdom’s diplomats not only kept track of Shias, Al-Azhar, and alleged conversions, but also kept tabs on journalists and their writing. Some journalists did knock on the Saudi mission’s door, hoping to be rewarded for favorable coverage. The embassy hired one of them to set up its media relations department in 2012, paying him $200,000 while he was still working as the anchor of a talk show and sat on the board of a major Egyptian newspaper. Except for the number of zeros at the end of the sums, things had not changed much since the 1990s, when Egyptians working for Saudi-owned newspapers engaged in self-censorship to flatter the kingdom. In 2010, Ahmed had received a bizarre phone call from the Saudi embassy, telling him he was banned from visiting the kingdom, even though he had never even applied for a visa and had no desire to visit. But he wrote often about the kingdom, sometimes with disdain, but always with piercing insight.
