Education and Authority

Such books, the market in intellectual goods of which they are a part, and the educational institutions that prepare people for their use are important elements of the cultural context in which ordinary educated Egyptians perceive their religious duties and fashion personal commitments. As a context, intellectual goods are important not merely in proportion to the number of people who actually consume them, but insofar as they provide a subject for talk and an opportunity for the crystallization of viewpoints within a public discourse whose boundaries are set by the kinds of products available on the market. Some time before the First World War, Weber warned specifically against focusing on cultural production as a causal agent:

[A] religious renascence [cannot] be generated by the need of authors to compose books, or by the far more effective need of clever publishers to sell such books. No matter how much the appearance of a widespread religious interest might be simulated, no new religion has ever resulted from the needs of intellectuals or from their chatter. The whirligig of fashion will presently remove this subject of conversation and journalism, which fashion has made popular.^[20]

But this confidence in the limited appeal of intellectual chatter made more sense in an era before radio and television broadcasts, before the political projects of decolonization and school-based nationalist mobilization, before the market-driven successes of Scientology, est, and the New Age in the West. It makes less sense now, particularly in the Egyptian context, where both the fact and its opposition increasingly participate in what Weber called “the struggle of priests against indifference… and against the danger that the zeal of the membership would stagnate,” ^[21] a struggle that reaches to the heart of both the school and the market. Since Islam is not a new religion but rather an elaborate set of contexts—political and economic, historical and institutional, intellectual, social and personal—in which new discourses are apprehended, evaluated, and employed, both “proletarian intellectualism” and “the need of literary, academic, [and] cafe-society intellectuals to include religious feelings…among their topics for discussion” ^[22] are in fact important sources and constituents of broad-based public religious interest and activity.^[23]

The standard theory of social action, in which individuals and groups respond to social stress by taking refuge in religion, implies that, were the stress relieved, they would return to the status quo ante, rather like the mercury in a barometer responding to changes in atmospheric pressure (Davis and others, in fact, use terms like pressurized to describe the crisis of the petite bourgeoisie).^[24] As part of the Egyptian government's own folk theory of the etiology of Islamism, this barometric metaphor results in an enormous volume of talk about job creation, family planning, housing construction, slum clearance, and recreational opportunities for bored and idle youth, in addition to police and educational strategies. If things get better, the theory runs, people will either accept official interpretations of Islamic law, abandoning their false and mistaken ideas, or they will cease to care about religion quite so much, relieved of the need to seek refuge in its symbols of comfort or of resistance.

But in thereby treating culture as a dependent variable, the barometric approach ignores the institutional frameworks and social processes through which culture is created and transmitted. Like other institutions, religious and educational ones fill not only a social need, but a social space. They take on a very real life of their own with interests, dynamics, and potentials that are only incompletely determined by the intersection of forces that brought them about. The development of educational facilities is a prime case in point. Popular schools were first established in Europe to foster basic skills and basic piety among the working classes. And while they still fulfill similar functions on a wider scale, they have now become traditional institutions whose presence is taken for granted. It is almost impossible, now, to think about childhood without thinking of the school. It is simply what children do, and at higher levels, as we have seen in Egypt, the school has come to play an indispensable role as a status-granting institution as well. Older marks of social status such as aristocratic standing or wealth become nearly irrelevant if not coupled with long-term schooling, and in fact to “be educated” is a prime constituent of status itself, regardless of the actual skills, dispositions, or material rewards it has fostered.

Important social movements like the crusade for popular schooling or the Islamic Trend do not leave either their participants or their observers unchanged, and never leave the social environment unchanged. They either succeed in transforming various aspects of social reality in which the next generation of actors must live, or merely strew it with the litter of bygone upheavals in the form of a literature that can be rediscovered later and reinterpreted in new contexts. The barometric theory of political action does not acknowledge that, after the mercury rises, a new equilibrium point is created such that relief of the initial pressure will not result in its return to its old starting point. History may repeat itself, but such repetition is not cyclical. Underlying the oscillation of the economy and the rise and fall of political movements is a cultural, social, and infrastructural background that is cumulative rather than substitutive. New generations of Egyptians confronting the choice between ideological allegiances will always perceive the choice differently, because of the specific historical point at which they enter the system. Therefore, the explanations that we offer for their choices must also change, taking into account the new conditions in which human beings live. This most basic conundrum of human life is of course the theoretical core of both sociology and anthropology: that, in Max Weber's words, society is “an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him…as an unalterable order of things in which he must live.” ^[25] Or, in the more powerful imagery of Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” ^[26]

In Egypt, the religious environment of the 1920s or the 1950s was not the same as that of the 1970s, and neither is comparable to that of the 1990s. One of the reasons for this is that compulsory formal religious education reaches so many more people than it ever has before, and that Islamic publications, broadcasts, lectures, public meetings, and other institutions are becoming an inescapable part of public culture, generating their own controversies, reactions, and imitations. The spread of literacy together with the functionalization of the religious tradition has created a new Islam, one that is defined as a necessary instrument of public policy. The part the educational system plays in this creation lies not so much in any of the specific communications it makes about the locus of authority or the character of Islamic government—which can be and are ignored as propaganda—but in the creation of the need for religious information, the tendency to look toward religion for certain things, the creation of certain compartments in a conceptual order that can only be filled by something, regardless of its specific content, labeled “Islamic.” Just as advertising in capitalist societies works not so much by building loyalty to particular products, but by reinforcing the advantages of consumption in general, so religious messages in public space largely exert general rather than specific effects.^[27] This is why the state is finding it so difficult to control the movements it helped set in motion. Like its own Islamist opposition groups or Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front, it has participated in a relentless “establishment of Islamized spaces” ^[28] and created a need for which it cannot provide sole satisfaction.

Thus, while it true that at various historical moments, anticolonial sentiment, or rural-urban migration, or military humiliation, or the relative deprivation of the lower middle classes, have contributed to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (in the 1930s) and its derivative organizations (in the 1970s), viewing these same conditions as both necessary and sufficient for the formation of the contemporary Islamic Trend is unsatisfactory. For while motivations change from generation to generation, the common thread linking these generations—a long-term change in the social relations of Islamic cultural production—has to be considered central. As we have seen, the Islamization of Egyptian public culture is not just the effect of the Islamic Trend; it is one of its sources. This fact has an important practical implication. Given the continuity of a functionalized Islamic discourse in concert with the changing motivations of different generations for joining the Trend, no single political or economic strategy can disable it.