A Quiet Revolution (23 page)

prominent and exceedingly active figure with the Brotherhood. But this was evidence of al-Ghazali’s own personal leadership, not of the Broth- erhood having sought to encourage women’s activism and leadership in the movement.)

Exploring Islamist literature of the era to understand these changes, Talhami found that there was now, as in the seventies, a “plethora of Is- lamist writings on women”—a subject which, she notes, had not been of particularly consuming interest to Islamists in earlier decades. Issues of women’s roles and rights to education and to work were being exten- sively discussed now, as were issues of women’s importance to, partici- pation in, and responsibilities toward the Islamist movement. Even the question of whether women had a duty to participate in jihad, in the sense of armed struggle, was discussed.

There was little disagreement among the mainstream Brother- hood’s leaders that women did meet the qualifications for armed jihad. There were differing views, however, on whether women had an obliga- tion to undertake jihad only in defense of community, and also on whether women could abandon home and family to fulfill these obliga- tions.
10

There was also consensus as to women’s right to education and to work, although all agreed that women’s primary responsibility was to home and family, and that issues of rights could be discussed only in re- lation to the social good. There were shades of opinion on this matter, too, although there was general agreement with the opinion articulated by one Islamist ideologue, Hamid Suleiman, to the effect that women may work outside the home “if no social or moral damage accrued . . . and if their work did not interfere with their domestic duties.” Suleiman also maintained that women could hold any position in society other than that of head of state or Grand Imam.
11

Others also, and most notably Muhammad al-Ghazali, a leading Islamist thinker of this period, wrote in firm support of women’s right to work. Al-Ghazali also strongly critiqued opponents of women’s rights, even arguing against the evidence used to support the notion that women were unfit to serve as political leaders. With respect to the hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad reportedly commented, referring to a Persian queen, that “those who are governed by a woman are doomed to

misery,” al-Ghazali maintained that this was because the Persian queen had ruled incompetently and that she had “completely neglected shura [consultation].” Al-Ghazali continued: “Had there been shura in Persia or had the woman governed like the leader of the Jewish people, Golda Meir, there would have been a different comment.”
12

Indisputably, though, the consensus was that the Islamist founda- tional ideal was of women as members of families headed by men, de- voting their primary energies to nurturing and educating children—a role “decreed by her special nature,” as Muhammad al-Ghazali main- tained.
13

Working through this literature—and in the context now, by the early
1990
s, when Talhami was pursuing her research—of women’s ev- ident activism in Islamism, Talhami goes on to argue that when the

Brotherhood reemerged in the seventies as an organization that had re- nounced violence and committed itself to working through da‘wa and education to bring about the sharia-based Islamist society, it came to grasp the key contributions that women could make both by their dress and by their activism, to the project of the re-Islamization of society. Consequently, Islamists now deliberately set out, Talhami asserts, to mo- bilize women “as recruiters and advocates of the puritanical ideology.” This did not mean that Islamists were abandoning their commit- ment to the ideal of women as members of families headed by men and whose first duties were to the family. Rather, notes Talhami, the Broth- erhood now saw its entire membership, including its “politicized female members,” as part of the vanguard. The role of the vanguard was that of working through the gradualist nonviolent means of the jihad of educa- tion and da‘wa to bring about the transformation and re-Islamization of society. It did not matter, as Zainab al-Ghazali had stated, how long it took: this was the task that the vanguard, women and men, were called to in these extraordinary times. Women who were part of this vanguard were exempt, Talhami concluded, just as Zainab al-Ghazali was exempt, from “many of the rules of Islamic feminine orthodox behavior.” Thus the vanguard, Talhami continues, “was an extraordinary formation for extraordinary times. Women, it was assumed, would resume their place in the Islamic utopia of the future, where men would carry the burden

of managing the affairs of the family.”

Women were offered a vision, Talhami wrote, “of future economic equality and plenty, where no one went hungry or unclothed. It was a vi- sion moreover of a righteous society where dignity and humanity would be amply protected.” And women themselves, particularly university women, were attracted and mobilized by this “revivalist social gospel of economic equality and authentic Islamic existence.”
‌

Altogether, Talhami concluded, also citing the themes and argu- ments that figured in the Islamist literature she analyzed, the mobiliza- tion of Islamic women in Egypt was a “careful and orchestrated endeavor to produce a breed of Islamic feminine activists. While university women were among the most susceptible to the message of Islamist regenera- tion and renewal, more traditional and homebound women were also targeted.” Talhami also noted in the literature a preoccupation with is- sues of women and veiling, particularly in the work of writers advocat- ing resistance to Western imperialism. Women were “reminded of the degradation heaped upon them as a result of the economic imperialism of the West” and were cast at once as “heroines and defenders of the fab- ric of Islamic society,” and as at the center of a “regenerative effort to re- store” the Muslim world.
14

In rebuttals of the idea of Western superiority Talhami found the “veiling issue became the centerpiece of the Islamist debate,” with the writers going to great lengths to explain and justify its practice. Critiques of imperialism and of the idea of Western superiority were accompanied by critiques of past and contemporary Egyptian intellectuals, including feminists, who, Islamists maintained, had been “dazzled by the glitter and the glory of European civilization,” and who had promoted Western ideas and values in part because “orientalism had succeeded in sowing the spirit of defeatism in Muslim minds by emphasizing all that was neg- ative in the Islamic heritage.” The strategy they used to discredit feminists in particular was that of portraying them as un-Islamic and as culturally Westernized.

Talhami also draws attention to the extraordinary importance that some militant jihadists gave to the veil. Shukri Mustapha, leader of the radical militant group Takfir wal-Hijra, believed that the “true Muslim community” must follow a number of principles that rendered it dis- tinctive, including the wearing of Islamic dress. Salah Siriyyah, founder

of another radical group, went so far as to assert that those “who op- posed Islamic dress for women and advocated indecent dress deserved to be killed.”

The “Islamic veil,” Talhami writes, “was therefore important be- cause it defined the Islamic movement and gave it an identity distin- guishable from the rest of society.” She continues firmly: “Any other explanation of the spread of the veil—attributing this custom to hard economic times and general inability to purchase Western clothes—is far from valid. Neither is it accurate to claim that women cleverly assumed the veil to facilitate their freedom of movement.” There is only one cor- rect reading, Talhami maintains, of the spread of the veil. “The veil was conceived by the originators of the radical Jihad group as an assertion of the superiority of Islamic societal rules of the past, as well as an identity symbol to separate true believers from the quasi believers.”

It is not clear why Talhami assumes that what the veil meant to the “originators of the radical jihad group” trumped its meanings across all groups. After all, those scholars who had suggested (and whose sugges- tions Talhami here categorically dismisses) that women had their own motivations for wearing hijab were writing of women who were not members of radical Islamist groups.

Talhami was writing her book in the mid-
1990
s, the era when in-

cidents of violence and religious intolerance toward intellectuals had reached shocking levels in Egypt. This backdrop—seeming to suggest that radical militants were gaining influence and power—perhaps in- fluenced Talhami to give more weight and centrality to militant extremist views of the veil than they in fact merited.

In any case, Talhami does appear to be rather too sharp in her crit- icism of previous researchers. The evidence presented collectively by the scholars reviewed so far suggests that many forces were synergistically driving forward the profound sartorial and religious transformation in Egypt over those decades, a transformation that already was beginning to spread globally.

Al-Islam hua al-hal (Islam is the solution)

*

—Slogan of Muslim Brotherhood

By the early
1990
s, Islamists had gained control of several of the most influential professional organizations, including those of engi- neering, medicine, pharmacy, and law. Their growing power and influ- ence in the country was increasingly evident now in many institutions, including the media and schools and colleges. The products of earlier Is- lamists’ educational efforts had now come of age and were themselves donating time and labor as volunteer doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals to promote the Islamist cause.

By now Islamists had established private schools to serve the middle and upper classes, in addition to their many schools to serve the poor. The government through these years (in an attempt, as we saw earlier, to gain legitimacy by co-opting religion) had greatly increased religious teaching in schools, as well as religious programming in the media.
15
All of these contributed to the ever-growing dominance of the language of religious piety as the acceptable and normative language throughout society.

In the early
1990
s, however, the government attempted to change

course with respect to religion in education. Growing tensions around the issue of increasing Islamist influence in schools developed into a cri- sis that erupted in
1994
around, specifically, the issue of Islamic dress and the veil in schools. The early
1990
s was a period of suddenly escalating Is- lamist violence after a time of quiescence through the eighties, following the government’s crackdown on Islamist extremism after Sadat’s murder in
1981
.

In
1991
the minister of education, who had held the post since
1987

and who had been a strong advocate of a “return to conservative reli- gious values,” was removed from office and replaced by Kamal Baha Eddin, a man who had served as secretary general of a youth organiza- tion in the Nasser era. Baha Eddin immediately set about reorienting schools away from religion and Islamization. Declaring that education was a matter of critical importance to national security, Baha Eddin stressed that schools had the mandate in these times of “protecting the nation’s youth from dangerous, or ‘extremist’ elements within society.”
16

In
1993
a senior official in Baha Eddin’s ministry published a re-

port stating that ninety state schools and three hundred teachers had been found to have links to illegal Islamist organizations. The report had indicated that most of these schools and teachers were located in south-

ern Egypt, but in an interview Baha Eddin said that extremism was not in fact limited to any particular region but was now a “nationwide phe- nomenon.” Government schools, Baha Eddin asserted, were filled with Islamist teachers “who were using their position to indoctrinate Egyp- tian youth.” “The terrorists,” the minister declared, “had been targeting schools for years.... We have found schools where students are told not to salute the flag, sing the national anthem or talk or study with Chris- tian students.” Gaining control of the schools, the minister wrote, was a matter of national security.
17

Islamist extremism and terrorism were on the minds of many in Egypt in the early
1990
s. Mainstream Islamists had been steadily gaining ground across society and in the professions through the
1970
s and
1980
s, and these were gains that continued apace. But now new factors, and in particular the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in
1989
, followed by the fall of Kabul, meant that jihadi warriors who had come to Afghan- istan from all over the Muslim world to fight in the jihad against the So- viets would now be disbanded. Several hundred Egyptian “Afghans” trained and radicalized in Peshawar and knowing only the ways of war and violence now returned home—injecting a new level of violence and militancy into society. Militant extremist groups, reinvigorated by the

return of these hardened jihadi fighters, now embarked on an unrelent- ing campaign of murder and acts of atrocity.
18

Violent attacks now began occurring with increasing frequency against such targets as video stores and nightclubs—venues identified by militant Islamists as promoters of “moral decadence.”
19
Attacks oc- curred too against government buildings, banks, and government offi- cials. Similarly, Coptic (Egyptian Christian) churches and businesses were targeted.

Prominent intellectuals who were critical of Islamism or whose views extremists considered un-Islamic also became targets. Naguib Mahfouz, for example, the novelist and Nobel laureate, was stabbed—on the grounds that his books were blasphemous. He survived, though the attack left his writing hand crippled. This attack—which took place in

1994
, when Mahfouz was in his eighties—seemed a shocking gauge of