For about two decades following the 1952 revolution, the attitude towards religion in Egypt seemed to remain as it was before the revolution, but things were happening under the surface that were not to erupt until the 1970s. It was from that time onward that religion came to be regarded, not only as a part of life, but as the whole of it.
This change started to be manifested in women’s dress, in the increase in the number of bearded men, in the number of men (and later on, of women) going to mosques, in the number of religious books published, and in the immense popularity of certain religious figures who offered new interpretations of Islam. These interpretations often emphasized rituals and outward behavior than feelings, intentions and morality.
This striking change has often been labeled “Religious Awakening but whether or not one accepts this label, depends on what one regards as the essence of religion. Rather than being an “awakening, it seems to be more like the replacement of one interpretation of religion by another.
Many have suggested that this change was brought about by Egyptian migrants to the Arab oil-rich countries, where people have always adopted a different attitude to religion to that of Egyptians.
But I am inclined to attribute it to a much more serious transformation. Ideas and modes of behavior do not travel so easily, and do not take root in a new place unless the recipients are psychologically ready to accept these new modes of thinking and behavior. The great wave of Egyptian migration to the Gulf did play an important role but mainly because it, together with the big rise in the rate of inflation and the launching of the open-door policies in the mid-1970s, changed Egypt’s social structure as well as people’s aspirations and social relationships.
The transformation in Egypt’s attitude towards religion seem to have taken the following steps: The economic and social measures adopted in the 1950s and 1960s, and related to development efforts and income redistribution, drove large sections of the rural population and of lower income groups up the social ladder, and the process was accelerated by a wave of migration in the 1970s and 1980s. Inflation and open-door policies created new hopes for large sections of the lower classes, but unsettled and shuttered the hopes of a good part of the old middle class. In such a turbulent social climate of new aspirations and growing opportunism on the one hand, and of frustration verging on despair on the other, new interpretations of religion were bound to flourish providing some with much needed solace, and giving others a means of covering up new and morally objectionable types of behavior. If at the same time, a rapidly increasing number of women are driven (by inflation and the migration of their men to the Gulf) to find work outside the house, the shock, both to the women and to their men, of having to cope with an unfamiliar social climate, inevitably led to a less liberal, and often oppressive interpretation of religion with regard to the relationship between men and women.
If all this is true, it would be very wrong to think that the interpretation of Islam prevailing today is going to last forever.
Dr Galal Aminis Professor of Economics at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of the acclaimed “Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? .
