Science and Faith: Sadat and After

Under Anwar Sadat's leadership (1970–81) the elementary student population continued to increase much as it had during the 1960s, and the Ministry of Education's school building program accelerated slightly to keep pace. But, emblematic of the new president's personal and political interest in strengthening al-Azhar and other governmental religious agencies (the Ministry of Religious Endowments and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs) as a counterweight to his predecessor's socialist institution-building, a far more impressive increase took place in another class of primary school, the al-Azhar primary institutes, whose enrollment jumped by 70 percent in the four years between 1976/77 and 1980/81. These institutes, staffed by Azhar graduates and feeding students into preparatory, secondary and university study at al-Azhar, rapidly became a fixture in poor urban and rural areas where the Ministry of Education could not keep up.

As part of Sadat's attempt to steer the nation from the Soviet into the American military and economic spheres, a renewed commitment to Islamic symbols became part of government policy. Scores of Islamic activists from the Muslim Brotherhood, imprisoned during the 1950s and 1960s, were released, and Islamic student organizations at universities were encouraged to vie for influence with leftist groups. The new Constitution, drafted at the order of the president in 1971, specifically mandated religious education in the schools, and specified that the Islamic shari‘a was to be a major source—later to become the major source—of legislation.^[65] Sadat's motto “Science and Faith” came to symbolize the hope that Egypt could benefit from closer incorporation into the international market while at the same time retaining a unique cultural identity. And when that closer integration resulted in a disastrous multiplication of the country's foreign debt, and IMF-negotiated reductions in basic food subsidies led to nationwide food riots in January of 1977, enhanced religious education was one of the solutions the president called for to try to restore political stability. Speaking to a group of the nation's top religious leaders at a meeting he convened a little more than two weeks after the riots, Sadat told them that he wanted to talk about

the inner structure of the individual. What we suffer from today is not the difficult economic situation, because this shall be solved.…You may ask now, what is the real trouble? It is hatred and bitterness. It is the inner structure of the Egyptian man that was corrupted through 20 years [of Nasserism].…I called you today to discuss what we are going to do in order to protect our forthcoming generations from hatred, how are we going to build them up correctly and how are we to cure those who deviated?

Harkening back to another generation concerned with armies of malcontents “who see things not in the way they ought to be seen,” Sadat proposed his remedy for the moral crisis that seemed to have seized the nation:

At my meeting with the political leadership, I asked that religious knowledge should be a compulsory subject for a student to pass the academic year as of next year. Our brothers the Moslems and the Christians should be prepared for that with teachers and books written in a modern style. Let us face up to the age like every other country does. The old style is no good, not any more. We want a new style by which religion, values and faith would be part of our children's mentality from the start of their life.…Starting from the next academic year I want you to be ready with Moslem and Christian teachers capable of teaching religion in a new style by which we can protect our forthcoming generations and face up to the problems of today.…The most important matter is to restore faith, tolerance and love and to uproot the hatred that seems to still possess some souls.^[66]

Sadat's curious allusion to a “new style” of instruction deserves some comment. Religious textbooks of the mid-1970s, for example, though slightly different in format from current ones, are nearly identical in style (see chapter 5), and as fully bound to the goal of nationalist character formation as ever. Sadat's comment appears to recognize that the hegemony of the government's functionalized religious instruction had been only partial, incapable of preventing violence in the streets. But such a conclusion, literally unthinkable to a modern leader habituated to think in terms of educational amelioration, could only be expressed as the implication that an obsolete “old style” of instruction still held sway, and that some elusive new style could be found that would meet the goals of social control. This case of sublimated rhetorical force is hardly unique. After a century of obsession with the issue, Egyptian educational planning documents still implore “curriculum change to emphasize critical, scientific thinking to replace rote learning and memorization,” ^[67] a call that echoes Milner in its assumption that old ways of thinking have kept Egypt back, and that new ways of thinking cannot by definition have taken hold as long as the country remains on the international periphery. If the power of positive thinking can rescue the country economically, an unspecified “new style” of religious instruction can yet be found to keep the populace quiet.

In fact, if we look at the relative class time devoted to religious study in curricula set near the end of Sadat's tenure by Law no. 139 of 1981, which was in force through the end of the decade, other subjects actually crowded out religious instruction.

As shown in table 1, the relative proportion of time assigned to religious studies for the lower classes in elementary schools remained stable between 1903 and 1933, rising only slightly from 31.4 percent to 33.3 percent. At the same time (1932), the curriculum of the primary school, intended for the children of the urban middle and upper classes, devoted slightly less than 6 percent of class time to religion (see table 2). In 1951–52, a unified primary curriculum assigned 8.5 percent of class time to religion, a figure that increased to 9.5 percent the following year.^[68] The primary curriculum of 1963 assigned 10.6 percent of class time to the study of religion. Despite Sadat's apparent concern, Law no. 139 actually reduced the amount of time assigned for religious instruction by almost 30 percent relative to its position during the “twenty years of inner corruption” in Nasser's schools.