Are They Really Religious?

 

Are They Really Religious?

 

 

 

by Alaa El Aswany

 

Last summer a friend of mine was driving his elderly mother from the north coast to Cairo and on the way his mother, who is a diabetic, suddenly felt ill. He looked for a pharmacy and when he found one he went in and found a pharmacist with a beard. My friend asked him if he could give his mother an insulin injection. Amazingly, the pharmacist's answer was, "Sorry, but I don't give injections to women because that's against sharia. Go and find your mother a female doctor to give her the injection."

    My friend tried his best to persuade the pharmacist, telling him they were in a remote area and it would be hard to find female a doctor, and that his mother was more than seventy years old so there was no question of sexual temptation, but the pharmacist refused to relent. Another incident. A while back the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published an article about hospitals in Ramadan in which it revealed that the people working in the intensive care units and in the emergency and accident units left work after breaking their fast and didn't come back for two hours, so that they would have time to say the taraweeh prayers in the mosque. All this while they left their poor patients alone to their fate. Their condition might deteriorate and they might even die while the doctors and nurses worshiped in the mosque. That's because they considered that performing the taraweeh prayers was much more important than anything else in the world, even the life of an innocent patient for whom they were supposed to be responsible. The same strange logic turned up this week in the Ministry of the Interior. For thirty years Hosni Mubarak used the police force as an instrument to suppress and humiliate Egyptians. Police officers tortured hundreds of thousands of Egyptians and took part in all the Mubarak regime's dirty tricks – rigging elections, snooping on people's private lives, fabricating charges and recruiting false witnesses against opponents of the regime. During and after the revolution many officers committed horrendous crimes against demonstrators, including sexual abuse, blinding them with shotguns and killing them with live ammunition. The revolution should have led to a purge and restructuring of the police force so that it could resume its natural role protecting people and respecting their rights, but the military council insisted on preserving the police force as it is, with the same senior officers who belonged to the Mubarak regime. In the midst of this sorry state of affairs in the police force, dozens of officers emerged last week to announce that they would let their beards grow in line with the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, and when the ministry told them that shaving had been the established practice in the police force since it was founded, they rose in revolt, insisting they had a right to grow beards and remain officers. The problem here is not whether they should or should not shave their beards. But what is strange and saddening is that these officers have witnessed with their own eyes, and have maybe even take part in, horrible crimes against ordinary citizens. Didn't they see how their colleagues killed demonstrators and how innocent people were tortured in police stations and in State Security premises? We never heard these pious officers object to these crimes – and now they announce their sacred campaign for the right to grow beards, as if religion ended with appearances, with no deeper significance. In Egypt there are thousands of mosques and, thank God, they are so packed with millions of people that often they spread mats outside and pray in the street. But the question is: does this admirable commitment to performing religious obligations affect the way Egyptians behave towards others? The answer is often no. There are many Egyptians who observe the superficial aspects of religion and pray regularly, but in their daily dealings with others they are far from being truthful and honest.

    If the disconnect between belief and behaviour were a matter of a few individuals, we would dismiss them as hypocrites. But when it afflicts broad sectors of society, it constitutes a social phenomenon that has to be studied. These religious people who are interested in form rather than substance are not necessarily hypocrites or evil people. They are merely applying religion as they understand it and have been taught it. The reading of religion now prevalent in Egypt gives form priority over substance and is much more interested in forms of worship than in personal conduct. This version of Islam is not in fact Egyptian. Real and honest moderate Egyptian Islam has receded in the face of Wahhabi Islam coming from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. For thirty years masses of oil money has been used to drown Egypt in Wahhabi ideas. The purpose of this support for the Wahhabi school of thought is basically political, in that the Saudi system of government depends on an alliance between the ruling family and the Wahhabi sheikhs. Hence spreading the Wahhabi ideology reinforces the political system in that country. At the same time millions of Egyptians have migrated to the Gulf seeking a livelihood and have then come back to Egypt full of Wahhabi ideas. Egyptians go there and see a society different from Egyptian society. Men and women are completely segregated but rates of sexual harassment and rape are among the highest in the world. Alcohol is banned but many people drink in secret. The law does not apply in princes, who can do what they like, confident that they are immune from punishment. Egyptians learn there that performing your prayers on time is not voluntary, as it is in Egypt, but a compulsory obligation and if you are late the police might arrest you and harm you. They learn that if you are walking along the street with your wife and her hair is accidentally uncovered, then a policeman will pounce on her to hit her with a stick and make her cover her head. Despite this strictness about appearances and forms of worship, many Egyptians are cheated of their financial dues in broad daylight by their Gulf sponsors, and if the Egyptians submit legal complaints, they rarely obtain what they are owed because the judicial system there usually favours local people over foreigners. This is the essence of the phenomenon: the disconnect between belief and behaviour is a social malaise that has come to us from the oil countries and has spread like a plague, just as it has spread into Islamist groups. When the Egyptian revolution broke out most of those affiliated to the Islamist movement did not take part. The Muslim Brotherhood announced that they would not take part in the demonstrations but they joined the revolutionaries after the police withdrew (and to be fair, the young Muslim Brothers played a magnificent role defending the demonstrations during the Battle of the Camel). As for the salafists, who are more numerous than the Brothers, they stood quite openly against the revolution. Their sheikhs in Egypt and Saudi Arabia issued fatwas that demonstrations are haram and that Muslims have a duty to obey a Muslim leader, even if he is unjust. They asserted that democracy is haram because it advocates government by the people, while they believe that God alone can rule, not mankind. When the revolution succeeded in deposing Hosni Mubarak we found the salafists suddenly changing their beliefs, forming parties and taking part in democracy, which had been haram a few days earlier. The Muslim Brotherhood and the salafists made a deal with the military council by which the council would help them control parliament in return for them helping the council stay in power from behind the scenes. The military council set the rules for the elections in favour of the Brotherhood and the salafists and the high electoral commission ignored all the irregularities they committed. Here we find the same phenomenon: the strict Muslims who get angry if they miss Friday prayers or if they see a woman wearing dolled up have no scruples about exploiting the poverty of voters and buying their votes with cooking oil, sugar and meat. In the end the Brotherhood and the salafists won the majority of seats in parliament through elections that may not have been rigged but were definitely not fair. Although we have reservations about the elections we have advocated supporting parliament on the grounds that in the end it is the only elected body we can expect to protect the revolution and achieve the revolution's objectives. But day after day we discover that the parliament is incapable of standing up to the military council and that there are 'red lines' it does not dare to approach. The members of parliament have ignored the military council's responsibility for the numerous massacres in which hundreds of people have been killed and thousands injured, and they have not done anything serious to hold those responsible to account. The parliament has become a debating platform, just a talk shop that does not lead to any useful or effective decisions. We have seen the members of parliament in uproar, talking tough against the minister of supply because attacking him doesn't cost them anything. But they are ultra-cautious when it comes to mentioning the military council, against which they do not utter a word. The disconnect between the form of religion and its substance has continued in parliament, where members who have done nothing to defend justice have been preoccupied with extraordinary matters. Some of them refused to swear the oath to respect the constitution without adding the word 'sharia' to the oath (as if the constitution would have been written by the pagans of pre-Islamic Mecca). While policemen were hunting down demonstrators in the streets with shotguns and live ammunition, we were surprised to find one member of parliament giving the call to prayer inside the august chamber in mid-session, which led to a long debate about whether it was right to give the call to prayer under the dome of the parliament building. Another strange discussion arose when one of the members, speaking metaphorically, said that "the government was not composed of angels". Other members jumped up and strongly objected to the use of the term "angels" in any such figure of speech. The military council, having succeeded in forming a pliant and conciliatory parliament, is now preparing to carry out another step in its plan to control the government. With help from the Brothers and the salafists it is looking for a consensus president who would be under its complete control and whom the council would impose on the Egyptian people in the same way it used in the elections. The military council has issued by decree a presidential election law that has no equal in the rest of the world. Under this law a supreme committee has been formed whose decisions cannot be challenged in any way whatsoever. If you saw election rigging with your own eyes, recorded it and submitted the evidence to the committee, and the committee said there was no rigging, then you would have no case forever because the committee's word is final, irreversible and incontestable. The extraordinary legal immunity of this supreme committee deprives Egyptians of their natural and basic right to complain and appeal against administrative decrees, but the pious brothers who are members of parliament do not see in all that anything that deserves contesting. On the contrary they are joining the military council in  laying the groundwork for the council to tighten its grip on Egypt. True religion requires us to defend human values: truth, justice and freedom. This is the essence of religion and it is much more important than growing beards or giving the call to prayer in the parliament chamber.

    Democracy is the solution.                                    

 

    

 

 

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