A Quiet Revolution (11 page)

‘communism’ in general and the ‘irreligious’ Egyptian president Nasser in particular.” A council made up of twenty-one members was appointed, and it convened in December. The council members made clear that the League was trying to “bring together mainstreams of contemporary Is- lamic ideology and theology” and that it was seeking to represent “within itself some contemporary mainstreams of Islamic thought.”
23

The grand mufti of Saudi Arabia headed the council, and Saudi Arabian Wahhabism naturally was well represented at the meeting. Also on the council were Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hasan al-Banna and claimant to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maulana Abu’l ‘Ala Mawdudi, the founder and leader of the Jamaat-i Islami, an

organization similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and founded in India in
1940
. Like the Brotherhood, this organization had been running into difficulties in its home country—now Pakistan.

The League stated its intention to “promote the message of Islam” and to “fight conspiracies against Islam.” In addition, it committed itself to working for Islamic solidarity and for the “cooperation of all Islamic states.” It also argued for an “Islamic bloc” to take a stand “against Baathist [Arab socialist] regimes.”
24

Backed with almost limitless funds, the League set about its goals of countering Nasserite ideology and of combining the forces it had gath- ered in order to disseminate and promote to Muslims worldwide the so- cially conservative Islam that they espoused.

As Nasser used his powerful propaganda apparatus, including the radio station Voice of the Arabs, to disseminate his views and launch his rhetorical attacks on Saudi Arabia, the Saudis responded with a barrage of rhetoric and criticism directed at the Nasser regime. Condemning so- cialism and Arab nationalism as “un-Islamic,” they accused Nasser of misleading the people into putting their faith in the secular ideologies of socialism and Arab nationalism instead of in Islam. Stressing Saudi Ara- bia’s centrality for Muslims as the custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and the authority of its pronouncements by virtue of that position, Saudi Arabian rhetoric emphasized that religious and not na- tional or ethnic bonds must form the ground of identity among Muslims. Muslims must anchor their identities and the goals of their struggles and political activism in Islam alone, and they must turn away from such

delusory and un-Islamic secular ideologies as Arab nationalism and socialism.
25

The League distributed books and pamphlets, sent out missionar- ies, and supported the work of Islamist activists. It also supported the building of mosques in Egypt, the Arab world, and worldwide. To an important extent the League was able to pursue its goal by drawing on the skills and manpower of the Muslim Brothers who had come to Saudi Arabia to escape persecution in Egypt. As mentioned above, many among the Brotherhood who had fled into exile were educated, and held positions in Saudi colleges and other institutions.

The League now drew on the skills of Brotherhood members to organize their projects and to write, edit, and produce books and pam- phlets and, in general, to do the work of promoting and disseminating in Egypt and across the Muslim world the League’s understanding of Islam. Similarly the task also of mounting a rhetorical and ideological attack on Nasserism and Nasser’s ideologies and of blasting them as false and empty rhetoric when set alongside the power and truth of Islam and obedience to Islam, now fell largely to members of the Brotherhood.

It was thus often members of the Brotherhood who, backed by the League’s vast resources, now manned and oversaw the League’s publi- cations and publishing houses, and who directed and ran its projects, media, and missions. Nasser’s intimate enemies and the very people who had fled into exile from his persecutions were now disseminating through pamphlets, publications, radio broadcasts, and other media a barrage of rhetoric whose broad objective was that of undermining and discrediting Egypt’s “irreligious” president: the president whose “secu- lar” ideologies (as these were dubbed in the new rhetorical wars) of Arab nationalism and socialism were leading the Muslim peoples away from the ways of God and Islam. Muslims must reject these irreligious ide- ologies and return to placing their faith in Islam and God alone. Only Islam—and not Arab nationalism or Arab unity or unity in the name of any one or other ethnicity—offered the true and proper ground of faith, identity, and unity for Muslims.

During the Nasser era much of the Arab world, just as Hourani reported from his own direct observations, had marched inexorably forward into

the Age of No Veiling—an age that was to reach its peak in the late six- ties and would persist well into the seventies and even on into the early nineties. Although already widespread in the cities by the forties, being unveiled increasingly became the norm during the Nasser era, spreading even to Hourani’s “conservative lower classes” and also into the coun- tryside.

The women of the Brotherhood of course continued to wear their covering. But in the Nasser era and during the government crackdown on the Brotherhood, the Brotherhood constituted a group that was dis- tinctly marginal to the larger society. Even when they had been a power- ful movement they still constituted no more than a small minority of the

population.
26
Accordingly, in the
1950
s the Brotherhood simply did not

figure as a force at all in Hourani’s admittedly brief overview of the veil. The government’s commitment to breaking down class barriers and erasing class difference in part contributed to the spread of the prac- tice of not wearing veils. By the forties veiling was most notably a marker of class difference—whether in relation to Hourani’s conservative “lower

middle class” or with respect to village women.

The government actively promoted, in education, salaries, and other ways, the concept of women’s equality and their right to work. Women received the vote in the constitution of
1956
. By
1962
women had been appointed to senior government positions, and all the women holding such positions were bareheaded—like the majority of women in main- stream society. All of this doubtless contributed to the growing ordi- nariness of women going about their lives without veils. Among other things, the absence of the veil implicitly proclaimed and affirmed the national ideal of women as equal citizens. Not wearing any sort of hijab had become so common for women by the end of the fifties that on one occasion, when Nasser was making a speech in
1962
, a citizen called out to him asking him to require women to veil. Nasser brushed aside the re- quest, saying that he did not wish to “engage in battle with
25
million people [Egypt’s estimated population at that time] or at least half of

them.”
27
This response obviously indicates that Nasser took for granted that the vast majority of Egyptian women wore no hijab and that most Egyptian men supported this. Of course myriad media images from that

era fully bear out his assumption that uncovered heads for women were now entirely the norm.

The tide would begin to turn following Nasser’s and the Arab world’s devastating defeat by Israel in the war of
1967
. Nasser had himself of course come to power when a group of military officers had been spurred by Israel’s defeat of the Arabs in
1948
into taking action to overthrow the government. Opposition to Zionism as well as to imperialism had been staples of Nasser’s political rhetoric, along with the often-repeated prom- ise that never again would Egypt be defeated by Israel. Lavishing funds on armaments and on the army, whose officers became the privileged classes of Nasser’s regime, he had boasted that in any war with Israel, Egypt would achieve a swift and decisive victory.

Instead, the Egyptian air force was wiped out in minutes and Egypt soundly defeated—losing twelve thousand men. The defeat would mark the end of Nasserism.
28

Just as the defeat of ’
48
had led officers to conclude that the values,

methods, goals, and ideals of the old regime were bankrupt and useless and must be swept away, this defeat was read in the same way by the of- ficers of the day. One such officer would later write:

The Egyptian officers and soldiers saw their colleagues burned by napalm. We saw the army of our country destroyed in hours. We thought that we would conquer Israel in hours....

I discovered that it wasn’t Israel that defeated us, but it was the [Egyptian] regime that defeated us and I started to be against the regime. . . . there was an earthquake in the Arab- Islamic personality[,] not only in Egypt but in the entire Arab world.

In later years the author of these words, Essam Deraz, would vol- unteer his services to other Muslims under attack—serving in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Here, in the
1980
s, he would serve on the front lines along with Osama bin Laden.
29

Like the defeat of
1948
and arguably even more profoundly, the

1967
defeat would have an earthquake-like effect on the Arab world, set- ting in motion enormous changes.

Historians write that a mood of religiosity swept across the country in the wake of the
1967
defeat. That defeat profoundly shook people’s confi- dence in the government, and they began to see its promises as false and its “secular” ideologies as empty. For answers, people now turned to Islam and to religion, as indeed over the preceding few years a stream of rhetoric emanating from Saudi Arabia and the Brotherhood had ex- horted them to do.

Soon after the defeat an apparition of the Virgin Mary was seen be- side a small church on the outskirts of Cairo. Muslims as well as Chris- tians flocked by the thousands to see it, camping out overnight to watch for her appearance. Miracles and cures were reported. Some interpreted the Virgin’s appearance as a sign intended to draw Muslims and Chris- tians together into unified opposition against the Zionist enemy.
30
Oth- ers saw it as a divine sign offering comfort to Egyptians, as if to say that despite their defeat God was on their side. The mood of religiosity had palpable and tangible consequences too. Quranic reading groups now multiplied, and monasteries, which had been closing for lack of appli- cants, were deluged with applications.
31

The defeat allowed the government’s conservative Muslim critics to say that the defeat was a vindication of what they had said all along, that “the ways of ‘Islamic socialism’ were not the ways of God.” It was a clear sign, they declared, of God’s punishment of Egypt and the Arabs for put- ting their faith in Arab nationalism and turning away from Islam. The only way to recapture ascendancy and victory, they argued, was “by a total renunciation of man-made ideologies and a reorientation towards an unwavering commitment to the realization of Islam in the world. Is- rael did not get the victory because it represented a better system or a truer religion or a more perfect response to God’s revelation; rather, God used Israel to punish His errant nation and allowed the forces of evil to conquer the Muslims because they had strayed from the Straight Path.”
32
Similarly, the Saudis described the defeat as a “divine punishment for forgetting religion.”
33

As the mood and language of religiousness gained force, the gov-

ernment also took to invoking religion and the symbolism of religion in ever more public and formal ways. Soon after the defeat, for example, the top government figures attended mosque together. And in July of that year, in a speech marking the anniversary of the revolution, Nasser himself suggested that perhaps the reason for the defeat was that “Allah was trying to teach Egypt a lesson, to purify it in order to build up a new society.” And in a further gesture of conciliation Nasser released a num- ber of Muslim Brothers from prison.
34

This turn to religiosity would set the stage for the rapid return of the Muslim Brotherhood and the growing powers of Islamist groups gen- erally in the ensuing era of Sadat.

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3
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The
1970
s

Seeds of the Resurgence

F

ollowing Nasser’s death in
1970
, Anwar Sadat, then vice presi- dent, became president of Egypt. Although regarded at first as a temporary figurehead, Sadat moved quickly to consolidate his power and to veer away from the political and ideological course

that Nasser had set. In particular, he began to distance the country from the Soviet Union and to turn away from Nasser’s proclaimed commit- ment to egalitarianism and socialism. Declaring his intention to pursue a pro-capitalist stance and economy, Sadat began to seek alignment with the West, and in particular with the United States.

As he had anticipated, these ideological shifts provoked fierce crit- icism from the Left. To silence his critics and gain allies among religious conservatives, Sadat completed the process that Nasser had begun, re- leasing Muslim Brothers from prison and inviting back to the country Brotherhood members who had fled to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. A fair number of those who had gone into exile to the Arab oil states had acquired considerable wealth there, so the prospect of their investing in Egypt would have been an additional reason for courting their return.
1
Sadat now explicitly swathed himself in the language of religion—

for example, he described himself as the Believer President (
al-rais al- mu’min
). He encouraged and even gave secret support to Islamist groups, particularly on university campuses, where Leftist students had had a dominant role in running student organizations.
2

This was the Cold War era. Sadat’s rapprochement with the Broth- erhood—a religiously based organization that had been persecuted by the Soviet-leaning Nasser—along with his broad support for Islamist or- ganizations in general as he steered the country away from the Soviet Union and socialism toward closer ties with the United States, were all moves that were viewed positively by Washington.
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