by Kim Ghattas
There were endless speculations and rumors about the extent of Saudi influence in pushing this latest trend. The Saudi-Egyptian relationship was full of contradictions. Al-Azhar University taught all four schools of jurisprudence, giving them equal importance. Many of its teachers and students and even grand imams belonged to Sufi orders. Al-Azhar still considered Wahhabism to be a deviation from true Islam, and yet the Grand Imam was close to Saudi Arabia. He, too, would be awarded the King Faisal International Prize. Rich individuals from the Gulf donated money to the institution, and many of its preachers and scholars had studied or trained in Mecca. The influence was elusive but pervasive. Proud Egyptians simultaneously refused to acknowledge the influence of Saudi Arabia on their country, insisting that they were the teachers in this relationship, at all levels, from jihad to political Islam, while also complaining that the kingdom was corrupting their country. With its new wealth, Saudi Arabia was overwhelming and convincing. Saudi Arabia—the birthplace of Islam—had also been blessed with the riches of oil: surely, then, God smiled upon that country; surely theirs was the true Islam.
That’s what millions of migrant workers from Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, and other Muslim countries thought when they went looking for jobs in the young kingdom that was booming in the 1980s. In 1968, there were ten thousand Egyptians in Saudi Arabia; by 1985, there were 1.2 million. They were lower-class and lower-middle-class Egyptians, in awe of the wealth of their Saudi paymasters. Construction workers, drivers, salespeople, gardeners, and migrant workers practically ran the country, then returned home from the kingdom for visits or to settle back home permanently, with new money and new mores. They could afford to buy things that had been out of reach before, from television sets to cars and houses. Immersed in the Saudi lifestyle and worldview, many kept the habits they picked up there—the flowing white robe, the niqab or face veil for the women, the more assiduous praying, and the denunciations of Sufism, intercession of saints, and Shias. In Pakistani villages, the Syrian countryside, or rural Egypt, migrant workers who had struck it rich in the Arabian Peninsula built mosques to show off their new wealth and piety, installing preachers trained in Saudi Arabia. This submergence in the Saudi way of life covered everything, including women.
Egypt had always been a conservative, traditional society, but the veil did not dominate, nor was it a source of tension or debate; it was neither banned nor imposed by the state. The Gama’a had had some success in promoting the veil on university campuses, but 1979 ushered in a real wave, with women emulating the exhilarating example of Iran, covering their hair in a symbolic rejection of imperialism and the West. In the 1990s a second wave arrived, fed by Saudi money and proselytizing, which specifically targeted the middle class. In the 1970s, 30 percent of Egyptian women wore the headscarf; by the mid-1990s, it was 65 percent.
The veil was the new chic; it was a status symbol. In the past, middle- class and rich Egyptians may have looked to Europe for the latest fashions. Now they looked to Saudi Arabia and adopted not just the veil but even the niqab, which was previously an unknown phenomenon in Egypt.
The most dramatic visual of the black wave crashing over Egypt was the veiling of dozens of its beloved, beautiful actresses who had delighted generations of Egyptians and Arabs. One after another, they had their come-to-Islam moment. The first was Shams al-Baroudi, who had played the role of the working woman following her love interest to Australia. She went to Mecca on the pilgrimage in 1982 and returned veiled. She stood out as someone finding faith after a deeply spiritual experience. But Baroudi went on to actively encourage others to repent and leave behind their sinful lives as actresses.
By 1993, dozens of well-known actresses had donned either the veil or the niqab and were explicitly spreading their message in weekly religious lectures known as “Islamic salons” in the homes of Cairo’s elite. They impressed other women, who were mostly uninformed about religion, with these sermons, and they encouraged them to urge others to wear the veil and distributed booklets, some printed in Riyadh. Moved by their faith and injunctions, some of those attending the lectures decided to veil on the spot. Over time, hundreds of women passed through these salons, and most of them spread the message further. The “repentant” actresses, as they were known, were highly visible and public in their proselytizing. They were a curiosity, but they also set an example.
The influence of Saudi money was difficult to prove but on everyone’s lips. Several Egyptian stars, including the dainty Faten Hamama, who had appeared in the landmark Egyptian film I Want a Solution, alluded to the fact they had been offered vast sums of money to abandon acting and wear the hijab but had refused: one million dollars and a monthly salary of $150,000 was among the top offers one of them received from a man suspected to be from the Gulf.
The actresses who veiled vehemently denied they had been paid. But they did have connections to Saudi Arabia. Baroudi lived in Jeddah for a while, another traded in Islamic-style fashion and lived in both Jeddah and Egypt. Others spoke at events in Saudi Arabia about their born-again experiences in return for high speaking fees. Still others were driven by the necessity of keeping their job: the Saudis were setting up satellite television channels and production houses, they funded films and serials, and they didn’t want to see too much skin. Some of the repentant actresses renounced their art completely, but others wore the veil specifically to stay on-screen. Saudi Arabia was a big market for Egyptian cinema, and whereas in the 1960s and 1970s Saudis had enjoyed watching actresses in short dresses and big hairdos, the mood and the market in the kingdom had changed after 1979. There was endless speculation, disparate bits of evidence, and connections made—but no paper trail. None of the actresses would ever conclusively deny or prove the Saudi connection. But the suspicion about the Saudi role in funding this trend was the source of many jokes.
“Who are the second-best-paid women in Egypt?”
“Belly dancers, because Saudi tourists throw banknotes of a hundred dollars at their feet while they are dancing.”
“And who are the best-paid women in Egypt?”
“The converted belly dancers, because Saudi sheikhs transfer banknotes of a thousand dollars to their account if they stop dancing.”
Egypt’s famous filmmaker Youssef Chahine believed that religious fundamentalism was alien to Egyptians and described it as a “black wave” from the Gulf: “The Egyptian has always been a very religious person, but at the same time he is also a lover of life of art and music and theater.” He trusted that his countrymen would find a balance between secular modernity and traditional religious forces.
They didn’t.
Foda’s assassination marked the violent beginning of the siege of Egyptian intellectuals. For the years to come, secular, liberal, progressive writers and thinkers would be hounded, banned, harassed, and assassinated. The long target list included journalists, intellectuals, and plastic surgeons. Even the Nobel Prize–winner Mahfouz, a national symbol, as Egyptian as the Nile, came under attack—stabbed in the neck by two assailants in October 1994. He would survive, but his writing hand was severely impaired.
Religion took over everything, rapidly. In 1985, barely 6 percent of books published in Egypt were religious. In 1994, it was 25 percent, and by 1995, 85 percent of books sold at the Cairo book fair were religious. In the mid-1980s, there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians; by the mid-2000s there would be one for every 745. Taxi drivers played less Umm Kulthum and more Quranic recitations. Family photographs came off walls and mantels and were stored in drawers, especially photos of grandmothers wearing short sleeves and low necklines, or sporting the big hairdos of the 1960s. Modesty was the new norm, and pictures could lead to shirk, idolatry. The most orthodox, literalist concept of shirk and al-shirk al-asghar, the one that the young Sofana Dahlan had been taught in school in Jeddah, seeped into the consciousness of Egyptians, though it was a foreign concept in centuries of Egyptian traditions, art, and culture. Drawing nudes in university art classes was a t
hing of the past. Everything was now determined by halal or haram, permitted or forbidden in religion. Every second of people’s lives became regulated by religious edicts, the search for heavenly salvation. The beliefs and practices of Islamists, once on the margins, had entered the mainstream.
Decades later, once society had settled into its new cultural and religious references, a speech given by President Nasser in 1965 to mark the anniversary of Egypt’s victory in the Suez crisis would resurface and circulate as people asked themselves, “What happened to us?”—because of a passage in which Nasser had spoken irreverently about the veil. He was the greatest orator the Arab world has ever had, and his speeches—broadcast on the radio—enthralled audiences across the Arab world as he fluidly moved from rousing exhortations to serious explanations to jokes, all delivered in an easy, man-of-the-people style. He was a masterful storyteller.
In front of his usual massive crowd of supporters, a mixed audience of men in suits and women in skirts hanging on his every word, he came to the subject of the antagonism with the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of its members had tried to assassinate him, hence the brutal crackdown. He recounted how he had met with Hassan al-Hodeibi, the leader of the Brotherhood, in 1953. Hodeibi had made a number of requests, including apparently making the veil mandatory. The crowd, men and women, erupted in laughter and applause at such a preposterous idea. One person in the crowd screamed: “Let him wear it!” leading to more riotous laughter. Nasser said he had tried to explain to Hodeibi that this was a personal choice, but Hodeibi insisted: Nasser was the leader, he had to set the tone. Nasser continued: “I told him, you have a daughter in the faculty of medicine, she’s not wearing a veil, why? If you can’t make one woman, your own daughter, wear a veil, you want me to go down to the street and force ten million women to wear a veil?” By now, even Nasser was laughing as the crowd roared with delight.
Nasser’s legacy and his repression of the Muslim Brotherhood set in motion a dynamic that contributed, decades down the road, to the toxic mix of fundamentalism, Salafism, and Wahhabism in Egypt and beyond. A nationalist modernizer, he was also an observant Muslim who had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca twice—no one could argue that his views were the expression of a mind corrupted by Western values. They reflected perhaps his city upbringing and the condescension of the urban middle class toward the rural class, who still wore gallabiyas, traditional peasant robes, and still kept their women covered or inside the house. Those who made it to the city discarded what they saw as the backward attire of village life, choosing instead to embrace modernity. Islamists claimed that it was the influence of the corrupt West that pushed women to unveil. But such assumptions overlooked the fact that Egypt was the birthplace of Arab feminism, and that Egypt’s own emancipation from the West was symbolized in a famous statue of a peasant woman removing her headscarf as she leans on the mythical sphinx. That 1920 sculpture by Mahmoud Mokhtar became a metaphor for national independence and still stands not far from Cairo University, by the Nile.
Egypt had a long history of enlightenment, which gave hope to those living through the dark days of the 1990s. Foda’s last sentence in his 1985 Before the Fall was a rallying cry to other intellectuals, the expression of his own conviction that Egypt could still get back on track if only more moderate voices spoke up. It had worked in the past. “Dialogue is the only way out of this crisis,” he wrote, “because sometimes the word can stop a bullet, because it is of course stronger, and definitely longer lasting.” Foda’s incisive analysis had misjudged the extent of the social transformation happening around him. His faith in Egypt and in the pen had not saved him.
* * *
This was the environment in which Nasr, the scholar, was fighting for his own survival and that of his marriage in 1994, just a few years after Foda was killed. He couldn’t quite square his ordeal with the Egypt that he loved, for he knew that this was not the Egypt of his youth. Westerners looked at Nasr and others like him who stood up to Islamists and saw someone “like us,” an exception who shared their values. Nasr would come to resent that outlook—they didn’t grasp his deep Egyptianness. His was not a story about a Westernized, secular member of the Egyptian elite rejecting the ways of the rural folk. Nasr was a village boy, a man of the people, of the land; the waters of the Nile coursed through his veins.
There was room for tolerance in small villages like Quhafa, in Tanta, where Nasr was born. It was a village of believers, both Christians and Muslims. Tolerance was not a learned concept; it was how people lived. Nasr’s father had a strange friend from another village, a Christian Copt who came to Quhafa for work. The family hosted him for years, and when he died he was buried in the family cemetery. No one minded that he was a Christian.
There was room for modernity alongside religion in Quhafa. Nasr’s father, a grocer, had sent him to the village school to learn reading and writing, arithmetic, and the Quran. By the age of eight, Nasr had memorized the Quran. His father had big dreams for his eldest son: he wanted Nasr to continue his religious studies and become a sheikh in the tradition of the great religious scholar Muhammad Abduh, the nineteenth-century founder of Islamic modernist thought. But from a young age, Nasr had become enamored with another reformer: Taha Hussein, his generation’s most influential modernist, the figurehead of Egypt’s intellectual renaissance, and the blind dean of Arabic literature. A village boy from Upper Egypt, Hussein made his way to the classrooms of Al-Azhar and all the way to the Sorbonne in Paris, where he married a Frenchwoman and returned to Cairo. He, too, had argued that the Quran was full of metaphors and allegories, and while also full of historical facts it should not be read literally. He, too, had been accused of apostasy. The debates between literalists and modernists were not new—the difference was in how they ended.
Unlike Foda and Nasr, Hussein had stared down the Islamists repeatedly and won, every time. When women gained the right to enter universities in 1929, “religious reactionaries sought to drive them out” a few years later, but their “male colleagues confronted [them] and scattered the ranks of demonstrators who had stormed the college.” Hussein had mobilized students to defend women’s education, like a military commander going to battle for a “just cause” that was a “raging sea,” which could not be held back by “throwing a few pebbles into it.”
When charged with apostasy, Hussein had to leave the university for a few years, but when he returned, his students carried him on their shoulders triumphantly, all the way to his office. He eventually became minister of education in the 1950s and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he died in 1973, he was mourned as a great figure of the country’s intellectual renaissance.
Having aspired to walk in Taha Hussein’s footsteps all these years, Nasr was perhaps hoping he might be vindicated as well. But the tide of fundamentalism had come in; there was no rampart for Nasr. “Taha was accused of apostasy by people from outside the university, and the university defended him,” Nasr would later say. “In my case, I was accused of apostasy inside the university, and some people from outside are defending me. Taha Husayn was never called a kafir. What’s most telling is how the conception of apostasy has now been transplanted into the university.”
By the spring of 1995, Ebtehal and Nasr were exhausted. They were mostly confined to their apartment, armed guards standing outside. She had aged ten years; her eyes were puffy. She wore a pendant with a picture of Nasr on it like an amulet. She didn’t care if the militant Islamists killed them; something had already died inside her.
June of that year was dizzying in contradictions and upsets. Cairo University promoted Nasr to full professorship despite all the controversy. Any elation was short-lived. On June 14, the Cairo Court of Appeals ruled that Nasr’s writings proved that he was indeed an apostate and declared his marriage to Ebtehal null and void. The Islamists had managed to subvert the legal process. They had taken their fight from the mosque to the courts, and they had won their first big case. Egypt was setting a
precedent.
Sheikh Youssef al-Badri was one of the Islamist lawyers who had brought the case against Nasr. Like Shaheen, he was also a preacher, but in a small, neighborhood mosque. His sermons seethed with anger against the academic: “This is the religion of a third of the world’s population! How can you attack Islam and pretend you are a Muslim?” The faithful, barely one hundred of them, listened to the sermon as Badri exploded the day after the verdict. The ruling was not enough: Nasr was an apostate, a “murtad, and a murtad is a dead man.” To make things worse, Ayman al-Zawahiri reared his head from Sudan, where he and Bin Laden were by now, and issued a fatwa: killing Nasr was an Islamic duty.
On July 23, 1995, Ebtehal and Nasr left their homeland on a plane for Spain, then onward to Leiden in the Netherlands, where the university was welcoming him as a professor of Arab and Islamic studies. Within months, his books would be removed from Cairo University’s library. In exile, Nasr and his writing slowly faded from the minds of Egyptians, along with the names and legacies of Farag Foda, Mahmoud Mokhtar, Taha Hussein, Muhammad Abduh, and so many others who represented the era when Cairo and Egypt were the mecca of Arab culture and they were leaders in the region’s intellectual renaissance. For years, Nasr yearned to return home. Egypt came to him in his dreams. But it would be more than a decade before he saw the Nile again.
* * *
In August 1993, the Egyptian minister of the interior, Hassan Alfi, had survived an assassination attempt carried out by the Islamic Jihad. The attack made big headlines because of the high-profile target and the method used. Zawahiri had approved a new weapon: suicide bombings. Sunni jurisprudence was even stricter than Shiism on the issue of suicide. But just as the Iranian Revolution had inspired ideas among Sunni fundamentalists, the actions of groups like Hezbollah were provoking a deadly competition. The suicide bombing against the marine barracks in 1983 had achieved a key goal: the American troops had left. Palestinians took note. In 1987 Palestinians had rebelled in the West Bank and Gaza, after twenty years of life under Israeli occupation, arbitrary detentions, and land expropriations. Neither freedom nor peace was in sight. The First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) was a grassroots popular movement with mass protests that lasted six years but resolved nothing. Peace talks that began in 1991 in Madrid and then Oslo brought only slow, barely tangible progress. And so, just a few months ahead of Zawahiri and the attack on Alfi, Palestinian militants had opted to try suicide bombings in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, targeting a restaurant in the Jewish settlement of Mehola. That attack made few headlines. But Palestinians would continue to carry out countless suicide bombings against Israelis, both civilians and soldiers, in the Occupied Territories and inside Israel. Beyond fighting occupation, Zawahiri’s endorsement of suicide bombings had opened a treacherous door. In less than a decade, Zawahiri and Bin Laden would send nineteen hijackers on a suicide mission to crash their planes into buildings in the United States.