by Eva Hoffman
Sun Shuyun is a writer and filmmaker who has directed and worked on numerous BBC and Channel 4 programmes such as The Great Wall, People’s Century and The First Emperor. Hoping to promote a better understanding of China in the West through her films and writing, her five-part documentary series A Year in Tibet and book have appeared in more than 40 countries.
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Goodbye Orient: Resisting Reforms in the Islamic World
Hamed Abdel-Samad
When a man does not know what harbour he is making for,
no wind is the right wind.
Francis Bacon
Talking about the future of the Islamic World is just like talking about climate change or the expansion of the universe: no matter how much reliable research we have about them, we cannot be free from speculation, belief or even superstition. No matter how much we know about the history of Islam and the demographic statistics of the Islamic World today, we still cannot anticipate which developments to expect from this part of the world in the coming decades. The only thing we can assume to know is this: there are considerable processes of dissolve and even decay within the traditional structures in large parts of the Muslim World. Rigid traditional authorities are losing both power and legitimacy, leaving behind them a huge vacuum, which has not been replaced or filled yet by alternative structures. Iran is one example; Egypt is another where we notice growing individualisation processes, with millions of young people losing trust in older structures and searching for individual solutions for themselves. Walking along the streets of Cairo, everyone can feel a strong youth energy searching for new structures. Yet this energy is seldom invested in or canalised. From the laws of physics we learn that non-canalised energy ends up in uncontrollable chaos. The law of entropy, though, does not exclude a system’s capacity for spontaneous change.
If you are a pessimist, you could compare larger parts of the Islamic world today to the Titanic a short time before its legendary sinking, and you might discover several parallels between the two. You will see the overcrowded ship standing lonely and broken in the middle of the cold ocean of modernity and wondering where rescue will come from. The third-class passengers are still asleep downstairs and know nothing about the coming catastrophe. Rich people try to save themselves in the few rescue boats available on board. Religious leaders do not get tired of repeating the same hope-giving mantras. Disorientation, anarchy and self-justification are dominating. The so-called Islam-Reformers might remind you of the three musicians who kept playing until the ship went down, to communicate the illusion of normality.
You might discover one single difference between the Titanic and the Islamic world. You will see that the Islamic ship was old and full of holes from the moment it entered the ocean, even though many Muslims believed it was unsinkable. The heavy ship drifted many centuries with no compass and no harbour of destination. No heavy clash, but a slight friction with an iceberg called modernity was enough to throw it off its balance. Since then, large parts of the Islamic World seem to have fallen into a deep lethargy that they cannot overcome.
If you are a pessimist, you might re-read Oswald Spengler’s book about the decline of the West and apply his thesis to the Islamic World. During World War I, Spengler saw European culture declining in favour of a cold, overurbanized civilization. He saw all areas of life becoming artificial and materialistic. The European soul was losing its fire, fleeing to classicism. The German anthropologist looks at the world as history not as nature, and sees cultures governed by the cycle of time (youth, growth, maturity, decay) – a view that he might have copied from the Tunisian historian of the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun. You might agree with the Syrian poet, Adonis, who sees Arab culture already in the final stage of decay, predicting its irreversible downfall soon. He argues that Arab culture has already passed its zenith and has ceased to offer any civilizational contribution to humanity and therefore does not deserve to exist anymore. Considering the marginal Arab modern contributions in technology, science and art to the world heritage, one might not find it difficult to agree with Adonis.
You might agree with Dan Diner’s Lost in the Sacred. Why the Muslim World Stood Still. After leading in the fields of science, philosophy and medicine, the Muslim World lost its momentum because of the nature of the sacred which penetrates all aspects of the life of a Muslim. The sacred in Islam, according to Diner, suspends the acceleration of social time, hinders change, and circumvents secularisation and modernity. Diner sees the time-suspending impact of Arabic as a sacred language as one of the key reasons for stagnation in the Arab World.
If you are an optimist, you will prefer to believe in the estimations of Immanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage who reach the conclusion that Islam will go through an accelerated process of modernisation very soon. In their book, Le rendez-vous des civilisations, Todd and Courbage study the demography of the Muslim world and figure out that the increase in literacy among women leads to a decline in the number of children, which will lead to new dynamics and social mobility. They see fundamentalism not as a sign of the omnipotence of religion, but as a nervous reaction towards the increasing secularisation of the societies.
In this paper, I will not accumulate empirical facts and statistics, but will try to offer an intuitive, semi-sociological estimation of the situation in Egypt as a trendsetter in the Islamic World when it comes to both modernisation and radicalisation. I will discuss elements in Egyptian society that resist reforms and lead to stagnation. The Islamic image of God, the understanding of hierarchy and political authority, as well as the position of women and the concept of honour, will be related to the objectives of education in Egypt to get a larger picture of how change is vehemently resisted.
Disarming history
One of my favourite places in the city of Munich, where I live, is the Park of the Olympic Village where the Olympic Games took place in the summer of 1972. Especially, the so-called ‘Olympia-Berg’ has a strong symbolic character for me. It is not a real mountain, but a small hill less than 100 metres high over an area of about 1,000 metres. It is a beautiful green hill with many roads leading to the top, where visitors to the Park can enjoy a beautiful panoramic view over the whole city. But the special thing about this hill is not only the nice panorama, but also the story behind the construction of the hill. It is an artificial hill built from the rubble of the houses of Munich destroyed during World War II.
I have been reading many definitions of ‘Civilisation’ recently, none of which really satisfied me, as most of those definitions connect civilisation to urbanism, developed systems of transportation, writing and standards of measurement. Most of those definitions refer to the material achievement of a group of people, but neglect their state of mind, their self-image and image of the other, which for me are the core of any civilisation.
Standing on the top of the Olympia-Berg, I was able to construct my own understanding of civilisation as ‘the ability to transform something ugly into something aesthetic, and the ability to disarm history’. The German people could have spent years crying over the ruins of Berlin, Munich, Dresden and Hamburg, complaining about the atrocities of the Allies. Instead, they were clever enough to recognise that crying over spilled milk does not help. They decided to rebuild their country with the help of their former enemies. Germans did not lack pride or patriotism, but they recognised that a part of their misery was self-made; therefore they saw that the culture of resistance was not the right answer. Large parts of the Islamic World, in contrast, are still feeling the bitterness of defeat and humiliation towards the West. When asked about the reasons for the backwardness of Islamic culture and lack of reform, many Muslims still identify colonialism and the influence of the West as the main reasons.
Going down the hill I saw many people, young and old, men and women, jogging, Nordic-walking, biking or simply taking a walk. Of course some inactive, likely jobless people, that the welfare society can still afford, were also hanging around enjoying their beer. As I came down to the park I saw
a young, likely Gulf-Arab family coming towards me. The husband and his wife, in their mid-thirties, were walking slowly, their East Asian maid behind them, pushing a baby carriage. The husband was watching the hips of a young German lady passing him, the wife, in the traditional black gown and veil, was looking with resentment at the object of pleasure of her husband. She said nothing to him, but turned to her maid and started shouting at her without a clear reason.
No doubt such a situation could happen with any other family whether Muslim or not, but still it tells us a lot about the dynamics of a Muslim family and its triple attitude towards the West (fascination, scepticism and bitterness). It tells us much about the concept of modesty and the limits of Islamic morality.
The Olympia-Berg is, in general, a nice metaphor for cultural transformation – a process that the Islamic World is missing when it deals its own history. Reading school History textbooks in Egypt, for instance, we discover a clear split between a glorified history of Egypt and the Arab World on the one hand and an insistence on the role of the victim on the other. Muslims are depicted as the creators of a great culture that led the world for centuries before it lost influence because of Western aggression. History is looked at as a continuity of linear development: Islamic dominance and progress, then the Crusades, colonialism and Israel, which came to stop this glory through a global conspiracy against Islam. These textbooks are not telling students anything about the homemade problems and mistakes that led the Islamic culture to decline. Students are injected with mistrust and subliminal hostility towards everything Western. This state of mind determines the attitude of many Muslim countries towards modernity and science. Instead, a culture of honour and resistance is implanted into the minds of the students – a culture which I hold responsible for the backwardness of many Arab countries today.
A genuine feeling of helplessness and humiliation determines the relation of the Islamic World to the West. This sense of material inferiority is being compensated for by a sense of moral supremacy and dreams of omnipotence. This strange mixture leads to a real paranoia that dominates the educational systems in many Arab countries.
For generations, the Islamic World has been nourishing a feeling of bitterness and powerlessness towards the West. As Napoleon landed with his fleet in Alexandria in the year 1798, an asymmetric struggle started between a technically superior West and a culture caught in traditional Islamic thinking. The emergence of the ‘Other’ made Egyptians aware of their weaknesses. Traumatic experiences of colonialism and exploitation were engraved in the collective memory of Egypt and increased this gap between Islam and the West. The Syrian philosopher Georg Tarabishi calls this asymmetric meeting ‘an anthropological injury’ of the Islamic World – a chronic feeling of humiliation that still persists. A psychological distance towards the West and its thoughts has been the result of that.
But it would be a naïve simplification to believe that reforms in the Islamic World were not pushed forward only because of colonialism and hostility of the West. The Islamic understanding of innovation and the rigid authorities could also be considered responsible for the failure of modernisation. The Arab word for modernity is hadatha. It is semantically related to the word muhdatha, or ‘something new’, which has very bad connotations in Islamic religious discourse. The prophet Mohamed once said: ‘The worst among things is the muhdatha, for every muhdatha is an invention, and every invention leads to confusion, and every confusion ends up in hell.’ Even though the word muhdatha, as mentioned by the prophet, is meant in the first place as ‘renewal of religious rituals’, it is still building a psychological barrier towards any kind of renewal. If we compare the Arabic expression for modernity with the Japanese one, we might recognise the difference in attitude towards innovation. The Japanese word for modernity is bunmei kaaika (文明開化), which reads as ‘to open up towards civilisation’. The process of modernisation in Japan was called ‘Leaving Asia and going to Europe’. Fukuzawa Yukichi, a prominent political theorist of the Meiji period wrote an essay called ‘Datsu a ron’ (Goodbye Asia) in 1885, to explain to Japanese people that the wind of Westernisation was blowing, carrying a chance for Japanese people to taste the fruits of civilisation or make the choice to be left behind in their destiny. Rationality, and accepting the spirit of the time, helped Japan to become a major player in the twentieth century, without being necessarily separated from its own tradition.
Insisting on the past and adhering to the tribal culture of honour was the choice of major parts of the Arab World. Almost all attempts at modernising religious thinking ended up losing against an irreconcilable religious orthodoxy. Even in the so-called golden time of Islamic civilisation (eighth to twelfth centuries), when science and philosophy flourished, a bitter fight between rational and religious thinking was taking place which ended with the victory of orthodox thinking. Since then, no more processes took place that we might call comprehensive reform. Of course, there have been now and then some brilliant thinkers and single attempts to refresh Arab thinking, but they were like small rivers in the desert that dried up in the sand, and could never come together to be a strong stream grabbing everything in its way in an irreversible process called enlightenment.
No doubt the aggressive power-politics of the West during and after the colonial time led to a huge gap between the West and the Islamic World, but I see another decisive reason for the chronic feeling of humiliation perceived by Muslims. The core for me is the Muslim self-image. Muslims still look at themselves as carriers of a high culture with a mission for humanity. They cannot come to terms with the fact that they lost power a long time ago and that they themselves are to blame for that. ‘Islam could not bear losing power’; this is how the French writer Abdelwahab Meddeb puts it in his book La Maladie d’Islam. This leads to a tense reading of history as an explosive continuum that witnesses the glory of Islamic culture and the continuous aggression of the West through the Crusades, colonialism, war in Afghanistan and Iraq. This might explain why many Muslims react nervously and angrily when criticism of Islam comes from the West. The reactions to the Mohamed cartoons, the speech of Pope Benedict XIV in Regensburg about Islam and violence, and the ban of minarets in Switzerland are some examples of that. Even slight incidents, like that of a British teacher in Sudan who called her teddy bear Mohamed, or a German soccer team which says in its song ‘Mohamed was a prophet who knew nothing about soccer’, were enough to inflame the rage of many Muslims and occupy Arab media for days. All of these events are often put in one line with the Crusades and colonialism to prove that the West is nothing but one mass that is determined to destroy Islam.
Under this resentment, many Muslims isolate themselves from the world and barricade themselves behind an exclusive, inflexible identity. Their technological and material inferiority towards the West is often compensated for by a sense of religious arrogance that looks down at Westerners as dehumanised unbelievers.
Besides, the majority of young people in many Muslim countries are unsatisfied with the economic and political situation in their countries. The rulers, who are in most cases despotic monarchs or military generals, feel the anger of the frustrated masses and distract them from time to time with an outside enemy. Controlled demonstrations and tirades of hatred against the West help the masses in Egypt and elsewhere to get rid of their energy, so that they refrain from protesting against the ruler.
Wrong canalisation of energy is one of the key reasons for stagnation in Egypt. More than 70 per cent of Egyptians are under the age of 30. Many of them do not have a permanent job and cannot afford to run an independent household until the age of 30. According to Islamic morality no sexual relations are permitted outside marriage. That means that the majority of Egyptians are living in a state of sexual emergency. This sexual suppression is a part of a code which is pre-Islamic. The whole concept of hierarchy and honour is based on the idea of continuity and therefore resists any changes or questioning. ‘Support your brother, no matter if he is right
or wrong’ is the core principle in Arab tribal culture. Honour means keeping the genealogical family line and being able to recite the names of one’s ancestors and their great deeds. Only the woman can guarantee that no ‘strange blood’ comes into the tribe; therefore she should be watched and controlled by strict moral laws, by the veil and by FGM (female genital mutilation). No surprise that the Arabic word for ‘civil war’ and the one for ‘seduction by a woman’ are one and the same (fitna). In the Qur’an it is written down, ‘Fitna is worse than killing’.
Therefore everything new is often seen as a potential for fitna, a danger for continuity and for saving honour. Any questioning from inside could be understood as treason; any criticism from outside is often seen as a declaration of war. But there can be no progress without self-criticism and no enlightenment without breaking taboos.
Even in the twenty-first century the majority of young people, male and female, are still caught in the trap of strict moral codes which are against the nature of human beings. Sexual frustration might be seen as one of the key reasons for the radicalisation of young Muslims in Egypt. While their society gives them the impression that they are not needed, radical Islamic groups give young people the feeling of being grown-ups and members of the army of Allah. They restore for them the old Islamic utopia with the dreams of milk and honey. Hatred against the West, against the unbelievers and against religious minorities in Egypt is a main part of the discourses of these religious groups.
The Islamic image of God
and the unquestionable authority
Since its birth, Islam has tried to dissolve the old Arab understanding of belonging based on blood. The prophet Mohamed dreamed of a community based on belief, not on ethnic belonging and he was proud of having all skin colours and ethnic backgrounds among his first followers. But he recognised very soon that he could not unify Arabia without appealing to Arab honour and pride. To spread his message, he had to reconcile monotheistic thoughts inspired by Judaism and Christianity with old Arab pagan traditions, such as the rituals of pilgrimage to Mecca. He also relied on his tribe and made alliances based on ethnic backgrounds to defeat his enemies. The Islamic image of God therefore does not deviate much from the concept of the tribe leader. God in Islam is a strong patriarch elevated above the community. He never negotiates, only dictates. He watches human beings like big brother, punishes them for their mistakes, but cannot be questioned or criticised. He is frequently angry and jealous and does not allow any Gods beside himself. Taking a closer look at the history of authority in Islam, one can easily recognise that most Islamic rulers throughout history acted the same way as that God. Therefore it would not be exaggerated to claim that the history of tyranny and dictatorship in the Islamic world is deeply rooted in the basic understanding of Muslims of their relation to God.
Soon after the sudden death of the prophet, a severe civil war led to a split in the Islamic Uma. The supporters of Mohamed’s cousin Ali separated themselves and founded the Shia faith, while the tribe of Umayyad took the power and founded the first Islamic dynasty. Under the trauma of these of these events, Sunni theologians called on the faithful to follow Umayad leaders who took power over Muslims and to never revolt against them, in order to avoid any fitna, or civil war. Since then, there is a close relation between the authority of God and the authority of a Muslim monarch. This authority is felt everywhere today in the Islamic World – not only between the monarch and the people, but also between the father and his children, between the teacher and his students, and the boss and his employees. A culture of negotiation and questioning, which is the basis for every democracy, is missing. What everyone expects from his subordinates is not efficiency in the first place, but loyalty. Women especially have a tough time trying to cope with this unquenchable need for loyalty.
A girl called Wafaa
Wafaa is a young woman from a village near Cairo. She has not celebrated her sixteenth birthday yet, but she is already a mother of a young boy, divorced and remarried. You must have read or heard one of those horrible reports about child marriage, but what I am telling you is not a story I read, but a story I was directly involved in. Wafaa is my niece. Five years ago I was fighting to save her from FGM, but I failed. Her father who is a high school teacher and her mother, my sister, who has a basic education, said that Wafaa could not marry in the future if she was not circumcised. Although FGM has been forbidden in Egypt for some years, Wafaa’s clitoris was cut away as one of the many sacrifices a woman has to offer for a childish culture of honour. Two years ago, a 32-year-old man from the village asked to marry Wafaa. I intervened again to stop this marriage, because she was still a child of 14 years, and she was a very smart and promising student at school. I failed again and could not convince her parents, as Wafaa’s marriage was nothing more than a repetition of her parents’ own story, a repetition of millions of stories that happen every day in Egypt. Almost everyone believes that the early marriage of a girl guarantees her protection. Most men prefer to marry an inexperienced woman to guarantee her obedience and loyalty. Marriage under the age of 16 is forbidden by law in Egypt too, but this was also no problem: the marriage procedure was held without official papers. Wafaa married, but could not stand the sexual violence of her husband and left his house after one month. She was already pregnant. She had a child named Mohamed at the age of 15. Her husband tried to take her back home with the child, but she refused. The husband decided not to recognise the child, as there are no official marriage papers; therefore, Wafaa could not get a birth certificate for her baby because the moral government of Egypt does not recognise children of unregulated relationships.
A few months ago Wafaa called me and told me that she wished to go back to school, but her father did not agree to this. He was afraid that everyone would know that Wafaa’s marriage failed, which is considered to be a great shame for a young lady. Wafaa asked me if I could help her. I called her father immediately and told him in an undiplomatic way, ‘Listen, you committed two crimes already against your daughter: FGM and child-marriage, and I will not allow a third one. How come that you care about what people might say more than caring about your daughter’s feelings and future?’ I tried to convince him that going back to school would save Wafaa from a second marriage with an old man, which is the natural fate of every divorced woman in Egypt, especially if she has a child. I wanted Wafaa to go back to school to be a role model for every girl who is divorced, to show them that being divorced does not mean the end of the world. Her father was not convinced; therefore I decided to use heavy munitions. I told him, ‘I am not going to negotiate with you anymore. I will give you a couple of weeks, and if you will not send your daughter back to school I will sue you for agreeing to the child-marriage of your daughter and I will publish the story in the newspaper that I write for in Cairo so that not only the people of the village but all Egypt will talk about Wafaa’s case.’ Less than four days later, Wafaa’s school papers were in order and the fees were fully paid. She went back to school and was very happy for that. Less than 40 days later, Wafaa’s mother had a sixth child. The father could not afford the costs of Wafaa and her child and took her again from school and sent her to her ‘husband’ after he agreed to recognise the child as his own.
This story shows that liberal laws are not enough to modernise a society if its mentality is resisting change. Wafaa had to seek the help of tribal and family ties to find a way out of her misery, but even that did not help her much.
Teaching loyalty: the crises of Egyptian education
Even education has become a tool to sustain authority. Despite technical modernisation in many schools in Egypt, the educational system does not seem to have any vision for those millions of students. Nobody seems to know what the educational planners want to get out of the masses they teach and what to teach them. They teach them theories about citizenship and democracy, but show them something else in practice. The main objective of the curriculum seems to be to inject the students wit
h loyalty towards their country and the ‘leader’. Learning by heart and accumulation of unneeded information make many students use the school just as a bridge. The school cannot afford to teach students independent thinking and the skill of making judgments, as this will endanger their authority. If this is what the school wanted or the fathers wanted, Wafaa might have been able to defend herself and resist. Who should change this if the teachers themselves are a product of the same vicious cycle? Most of them are more influenced by what they hear in the mosques than what they read in the books.
A little story of a teacher in the city of Alexandria shows how education and authority are tightly related. In a regular exam, the teacher introduced a short text about the ‘blessed river Nile’ to his high school students. He posted the following multiple choice question: ‘What is the opposite of blessed: dirty, hated or cursed?’ He was punished because of this question by being degraded from a high school to a preparatory school teacher. What was his crime? The word ‘blessed’ in Arabic happens to be the name of the president of Egypt, Mubarak, a very common adjective indeed in a society relying on blessings. This was not the end of the joke. The way this teacher was sued is even funnier. To make the punishment seem democratic, the educational authorities said that a student of this teacher suffered from deep depression after taking this exam, because she felt that the teacher was offending the president who is a symbol of the nation. Maybe the president himself would not act like this or would not pass such a judgment, but the educational authority sensed the atmosphere and internalised this understanding of hierarchy so that they became more royal than the king himself.
The new Egyptian minister of education said in a speech in front of members of the senate at the beginning of February 2010 that he is unsatisfied with the performance at Egyptian schools; therefore he was thinking of allowing teachers to beat students again, which was forbidden just a few years ago. He said that by doing so he wants to restore the authority of the teacher in the classroom. The minister concluded his argument by saying proudly that he himself was beaten as a child at school, and that this did not harm him. But his way of arguing alone shows how much he was harmed. Only after the opposition media criticised his plan heavily, did he take it back.
What went wrong?
More than 1,000 years ago Cairo was one of the biggest educational centres in the world. In the mosque of Al-Azhar students not only learnt the Qur’an and Hadith, but also chemistry, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. In all the schools of Cairo there was a peaceful and fruitful coexistence between religious and natural sciences. Today, Egypt has distanced itself from science in a dramatic way. Young people consume technological products as far as they can afford them, but they do not know how they function or how to manufacture them. They buy satellite dishes to watch religious Sat-preachers who are very sceptical about science. Some of them even feel malicious joy when modern science fails, for instance when a space shuttle falls down or when an expert on genetic engineering dies because of having cancer. Religious preachers offer their advice also as experts on religious medicine.
So, what happened? What has changed in the last 1,000 years that has led to this distance between Egyptians and science? To answer this question we need to go back to the early time of Islam.
One can say that the Islamic culture had an easy birth, a turbulent childhood, a short, fruitful youth and a long, lethargic aging period. Unlike Christianity, Islam took power soon after it was founded and carried the responsibility of passing legislation and rules for daily life. The multiple functions of the prophet as a religious and political leader and lawmaker made a separation between state and religion almost impossible. He could never say, ‘give Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give God what belongs to God’, as he was both Caesar and the messenger of God at the same time. One more argument, which is used by conservative scholars in Egypt today against secularism, is that Christianity needed to go through the process of secularisation because the church was against science, but Islam was never against science. Such scholars say that Arabs used to be barbaric tribes who were fighting against each other until the prophet came and reconciled them with civilisation and knowledge. Because of Islam, they say, Arabs became leaders in the fields of science and philosophy.
In fact, it was not Islam that was responsible for the scientific renaissance in the Middle Ages, otherwise Mecca and Medina would have been the centres of the sciences at that time. Instead, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Cordoba were the centres of knowledge – cities that had experience with former cultures. Most of the first Arab scientists and philosophers were in fact not Arabs, but Persians, Syrians and Jews who built on the knowledge they inherited from their own cultures. The Islamic culture was capable of producing knowledge in the Middle Ages as it accepted diversity and translated the knowledge of other cultures. Averroes, the great Arab philosopher of the thirteenth century, translated the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle as a basis for his own philosophy. He used to call Greek philosophers ‘the ancestors’. Averroes invented the formula of ‘double truth’ to separate religion from science. He said there are two different truths independent of each other: the truth of the revelation of the holy text which is responsible for metaphysics, and the scientific truth which is based on intellect and observation. Neither of these truths can prove or exclude the other; therefore they should remain separated. Today many Muslims look at the ‘Other’ only as an enemy outside (the West) or a religious minority inside (Copts, Bahaii, Jews, etc.) that should be controlled and intimidated to show more loyalty. Modernity, science and secularism are seen by many as products of the infidels. The weaker the Islamic World gets, the more power the text of the Qur’an acquires.
Even in the eighth century in Baghdad, a theological school called mutazilite could discuss the nature of the Qur’an as a created book with a human side that could be analysed or even criticised. For a similar approach, the Egyptian Professor of Literature and Arabic Studies Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid was considered an apostate, and was divorced from his wife by a court sentence and had to leave Egypt some 20 years ago. Another professor was shot dead by Islamists in front of his house in Cairo in 1991 because he said the Qur’an is not a book of law, and cannot be seen as a basis for civil legislation.
The decline of education in Egypt started in the eleventh century when the fatimide monarchs had no more money for their warlords. Instead they offered them large pieces of land to buy their loyalty. The warlords invented the system of waqf, a religious foundation with a mosque, school and other charity institutions. These schools were not interested anymore in teaching natural sciences or philosophy, but concentrated on religious sciences. Every warlord could intervene to change the contents taught at his school, in order to polish his own image and ensure the loyalty of the students. He did the same with the mosque, as well. Looking at the state-run schools and mosques in Egypt today, we will see that they are still working according to the same principle. No one seems to be really interested in innovations, especially if these innovations might call into question the authority of the president. One of Egypt’s most famous scientists is Professor Ahmed Zewail, professor of chemical physics at the California Institute of Technology and the only Nobel Prize Laureate in science from the Arab World. Zewail has been fighting with Egyptian authorities for 12 years to build a scientific Centre of Excellence in Egypt which would apply the latest scientific standards. The authorities do not accept his plan, because he wants the Centre to be independent from the Egyptian government. Last year, Zewail was chosen to be Barack Obama’s senior scientific advisor.
Democracy
The famous Muslim-Brother preacher Wagdy Ghoneim was teaching his followers via a Saudi-funded satellite channel, saying that democracy means decadence. He gave the spectators an example to illustrate to them how democracy works. ‘A hundred people sit in a room and discuss gay marriage. If sixty of them say, OK, then it becomes a law that a man can marry a man. How stupid!’ This is
how the religious discourse looks at democracy. How about secular parties? Another Egyptian Nobel Prize Laureate is Mohamed El-Baradei, former president of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He decided to go back to Egypt to serve his country and he received a warm public welcome. In an independent TV show, El-Baradei said that Egypt lacks real democracy and needs an educational system with a clear vision. Since then, he has never appeared on TV again. After his name was suggested as a possible candidate for the next presidential elections in 2011, a sewer campaign was launched against him by the state-run media. Even opposition parties started to distance themselves from him. To run for president in Egypt, one needs to be a candidate for a political party or have the approval of two thirds of the members of parliament as an independent candidate. None of these options is possible, as the opposition parties themselves are run by the same patriarchal mentality relying on the one-person-cult. Many oppositional leaders have been sitting in office for as long as Mubarak has. The bestselling author Alaa Al-Aswani compared the Egyptian opposition parties to frozen chickens which melt only in the time of elections. The Parliament will never approve El-Baradei as a candidate, as it is controlled by the national party whose leader is President Mubarak and whose second man is his son, Gamal Mubarak, who is likely to be the one and only candidate for the next elections. Both the Al-Azhar religious institution and the Coptic Church showed clear support for the son to follow his father.
Heresy as a chance; or,
Towards a post-Quríanic discourse
There is no illusion like that of so-called Islamic reform. For hundreds of years Qur’an scholars have been trying to twist the verses of the holy book to make them fit our time. But none of them have achieved any success. The mutazilites of the eighth century, Averroes of the thirteenth century, and Abu Zaid at the end of the twentieth century, all failed. They all were only isolated rivers in the desert that lost their waters in the sand before they could come together to form a big stream capable of sweeping everything with it, to make for an irreversible process of reform. All of these reformatory waves were broken time after time on a stubborn rock called orthodoxy. They all failed, because the problem was never what is written in the Qur’an, but the attitude Muslims have towards the Qur’an. As long as the Qur’an is seen as the unchanged word of God, as long as the words of God are part and parcel of a political authority,
I see no chance for any reform.
We are all obsessed with the Qur’an. Militant Islamists search it for verses that justify violence and segregate Muslims from the ‘unbelievers’. Reform-oriented Muslims search in the holy book for words of peace that make coexistence possible. Even critics of Islam search for the same verses that fundamentalists love, to prove the brutality of the Qur’an. By doing so, each is giving the Qur’an more authority as a political document. The solution, as far as I am concerned, cannot be a modern interpretation of the Qur’an, but a neutralisation of the holy book and banning it from the political discourse. We do not need to be pro or contra Qur’an. It is enough to agree on the fact that it was revealed for a pre-modern community in the seventh century with different needs than ours today. We need no holy texts to live together. In multireligious and multiethnic societies, it is impossible to consider religion as a basis for the rules of living together. If everyone insists on the visibility of his religious symbols in the society he lives in, public space will be sacralised and will turn into an arena for religious conflicts.
Reform could only be a result of an act of terror against the chain that sustains an old system – a chain that connects religion to political authority and to the concept of honour. The dynamite to blast this chain is made out of rationality and common sense. It contains no quotations from the holy scripture except one single verse from the Qur’an: ‘God does not change people until they change what is inside themselves’.
The real heretic is not the one who writes polemics about the Qur’an, but the one who offers alternatives to it. The greatest heretic of our time is called Facebook. It is also the greatest democrat. Young people in Egypt, who do not believe in the promises of the old authorities anymore and search for individualistic solutions, are addicted to Facebook. They go online and chat about religion, politics and sex. They watch porno movies, listen to Beyoncé and Bin Laden. Yes, fundamentalists have also discovered Facebook. The largest groups are those of religious preachers. ‘Ahmed Ali invites you to be a fan of Sheikh Youssef Al-Qaradawi’ was a Facebook message that I received recently. Muslim brothers in Egypt have their own Wikipedia.
I happened to be in Egypt on the night of 31 January 2010. Egypt had just won the soccer Africa Cup for the third time in a row. All Egyptians, men and women, young and old, went to the streets to celebrate. All societal rules seemed to be suspended for one night. Cars were honking, children were painting their faces with the Egyptian flag, and veiled women were dancing in public until the early hours of the morning. I was looking at the happy faces of young people, feeling their energy and desire to be a part of something beautiful. I was saying to myself: ‘Those who built the pyramids must have been young enthusiastic Egyptians, just as these ones today, so what are they lacking?’ The answer for me was: they are lacking a national project that they believe in and a responsible leadership that could help them to invest their energy in the right place. They need to remove this thick layer of mud that covers their awareness and common sense.
We are experiencing the growing up of a generation that got more education than their parents and knows more about the world than what their parents knew; therefore the young cannot accept the elders’ authority so easily. The political authority has lost its legitimacy but not the tricks of controlling the masses. The traditionalists feel that the old structures are falling apart, and they panic and try to save by force a system which has passed its zenith. Violence, re-Islamisation and disorientation are side effects of the dissolving of that old system. My intellect is on the side of Adonis’s prophecy that the Orient is collapsing. My heart is following Todd and Courbage’s view about the rapid modernisation of Islam. Todd was the one who predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union at a time when no one believed in that. No matter which prophecy will be right, ‘Goodbye Orient’ will be the motto of the next decades. But it depends who is going to say it to whom. Are Muslims going to say it to an old system as the Japanese said it to Asia on their way to modernity? Or is the world going to say it to a sinking ship that refused to recognise that it is going down?
