An Alexandria Quartet

In the early morning hours of Tuesday, 29 August 1989, agents of the Egyptian Bureau for National Security Investigation stormed four apartments in Alexandria, breaking down the doors to arrest twenty young men and take into custody eighty boys between the ages of four and ten. The men, among whom were two university and two law students, a private school teacher, a student of da‘wa (Islamic outreach) at al-Azhar University, and an employee of the Helwan Fertilizer Company, were accused of “enticing the children with religious slogans and planting extremist ideas in their minds in preparation for transforming them into an extremist religious group.” ^[2] After initial interrogations the arrestees were driven to bureau headquarters in their respective governorates to be questioned further and then remanded to the national security prosecutor, and the children were ordered by then Interior Minister Zaki Badr to be returned to their parents.

On 31 August the story was front-page news in the government press: al-Akhbar headlined the story, “Arrest of an Extremist Religious Organization Aimed at Luring in Children under the Guise of Religion.” Al- Jumhuriyya ran a photograph of six of the accused, standing with eighteen of the boys sitting on the floor before them. Six of the boys had their heads bowed and faces covered in shame, and the headline read, “Arrest of an Organization for Training Children in Extremism at Summer Camps in Alexandria.” The next day al-Akhbar ran another photograph showing Colonel Muhammad Rashid, chief of the Bureau, returning two of the boys to their father and “warning him not to neglect his sons at this age.” ^[3]

The incident had begun the previous week when children and parents in a number of governorates, particularly Minufiyya, Alexandria, and Giza, began to hear about free four-day trips being organized for children to see the sights of Alexandria starting on Saturday, 26 August. Parents outside Alexandria were approached in mosques and asked to contribute nominal subscription fees (of ten Egyptian pounds; about $4) for the trip. One boy from Alexandria itself heard about the opportunity from some boys he met at the beach; another from neighbor children he met near his local mosque; a third was invited by the principal of his elementary school. Some of the local children went along not knowing the duration of the trip, and began to worry when, at the end of the day, they were not returned home, but taken to one of the apartments instead.

After the arrests the children reported that during their stay in the Alexandria apartments they were awakened before the dawn prayer each day to learn lessons, then taken to the beach for a couple of hours before returning to one of the flats. There they would be fed, and the rest of the day would be divided between lessons, prayers, and sightseeing trips, including an excursion to the historic fort of Qaytbay. The lessons they learned included the principles of brotherhood and obedience, as well as more specific advice. One eleven-year-old boy reported to al-Akhbar that “the organizers of the trip accompanied him and the children to a number of mosques where they gave lectures to them along with other people, and they told them that watching television was forbidden [haram] and that men's socks have to reach to the knee, and he adds that he heard a lot of talk that he didn't understand.” ^[4]

The tone of the newspaper articles was strident, al-Ahram reporting that the “extremist organization” intended “to establish a new generation bearing their beliefs” and that children who disagreed with the daily lessons were deprived of food; al-Jumhuriyya, on the other hand wrote that the organizers of the trip showered the children with food “in order to win them over, offering them [all] kinds of sweets and beverages.” The latter paper claimed that the frequent prayer sessions were “all aimed at implanting blind obedience in their psyches, and they slipped the extremist ideas inside of them until within a few short hours of their being given their instructions, the child victims (al-atfal al-dahaya) would carry them out with obedience.” It pointed to leaders of an unnamed organization behind the accused, who allegedly put the young men up to the task of enticing the children's participation.^[5]

Reaction to the arrests by Egypt's major Islamic opposition party was swift. Shortly afterward, Ma’mun al-Hudaybi, Mustafa al-Wardani, and Dr. ‘Asam al-‘Uryan, three leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, issued a statement accusing the security forces of brutality during the arrests and calling on President Mubarak to step in and halt the irresponsible persecution of the detainees. The Brotherhood regularly organized recreational trips for the nation's children, the report said, removing them from the suffocation and heat of inner cities to the healthful climate of the seashore, where they learn Islamic adab (manners, etiquette, comportment, culture). Furthermore, parents had consented to the trips and “clearly expressed their hopes that this activity would protect their children from the diseases of society, such as [drug] addiction and moral corruption.” It accused the government press of merely reprinting a report distributed by the Ministry of the Interior the day after the arrests, and asked where in the entire episode was there any manifestation of extremism: “The trip to the sea, or visiting the sights in Alexandria? The diligence of prayer, or the continence of tongue and comportment? Or that these children constitute a danger to public security through their trip?” ^[6]

The arrests and subsequent publicity were intended to make a dramatic and frightening statement to Egyptians about the danger of parents entrusting their children to unregulated organizations and individuals, and to underscore the government's self-assumed role of protecting the spiritual and physical well-being of the nation's children. The dual weapons of state power—the deployment of force and the deployment of information—worked in tandem to frame the incident as a threat both to the family and to the government. Groups claiming independent authority to interpret Islamic scriptures and transmit Islamic culture undermine one of the basic foundations of the state's moral legitimacy: its protection of the Islamic heritage, including the responsibility to provide children and youths with trustworthy religious guidance. Islam, the official religion of the Egyptian state, is a matter of vital government interest.

These twin issues of religious legitimacy and political authority are at the heart of a dilemma faced today by Muslim states throughout the world. As international political credibility comes more and more to be measured by the extension of public services and the trappings of electoral democracy, the tensions between mass sentiment and incumbent power structures become acute, as the government of Algeria learned in early 1992 when it was dissolved by its own military in the face of a threatened electoral victory by the Islamic Salvation Front. Egypt could very well be next in line to experience a political and military crisis on the same order. An unusually gloomy prognosis of this sort recently found its way into the policy-oriented Middle East Journal, penned by a U.S. government official who would only be identified with the frightening byline “Cassandra.” ^[7] In the academic world, too, senior scholars are beginning to say publicly “that the future of the Muslim world lies with the Islamic political alternative.” ^[8]

Our tendency in the face of such drama is to perceive a civilizational crisis arising from a fundamental conflict between democracy and theocracy, or between tradition and modernity. But such an analysis, specious in the case of Algiers, is useless even superficially in the case of Alexandria. For it is precisely Egypt's integration into the modern—or postmodern—world system of economy, politics, and culture that has secured for Islam an integral part in the governance of the nation. In Egypt as elsewhere in the Muslim world, the connections between religion and national security descend deep into the infrastructure of the modern state. The consequences of this fact for the limits of public policy choices and for the production and manipulation of religious culture are to be our central concern.

In a narrow sense, this book is about one aspect of Egyptian religious culture as it has developed since just before the turn of the century: the use of a modern public school system to teach children about Islam and introduce them to the official public persona of God. In documenting the role of the contemporary school in teaching Islam, I hope to show how the expansion and transfer of religious socialization from private to newly created public sector institutions over the last century has led to a comprehensive revision of the way Egyptians treat Islam as a religious tradition, and consequently of Islam's role in Egyptian society. In the light of this revision, I will argue that the increasing hegemony of religious discourse in Egyptian public life since the 1970s is a straightforward result of the country's institutional transformation rather than—as is usually argued—an accidental by-product of its current economic and political difficulties. As part of this institutional transformation, programs of mass public instruction conceived in the nineteenth century as cost-efficient means of social control have instead helped generate the intellectual, political, and social challenges posed by the country's broad-based “Islamist” movement, the most significant political opposition to the current Egyptian government.