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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 May 2000 Issue No. 482 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 May 2000 Issue No. 482
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters In defence of multiplicity
By Nesmahar Sayed
Mahmoud Khalil, assistant professor of journalism at Cairo University, and the author of several studies on religious discourses in the Egyptian press, recalls that when Abdel-Wahab and Abdel-Halim sang Ilia Abu-Madi's "I do not know from whence I came," or when Abdel-Wahab and Nagat Al-Saghira sang Kamel Al-Shenawi's lyrics "You were a sin I asked God not to forgive me for," the songs, if they were criticised by some, hardly brought crowds onto the streets to bay for blood. Times, though, have changed, and when Al-Shaab, the mouthpiece of the Labour Party, wanted to up-the-ante in its on-going campaign against the minister of culture, it chose, predictably enough, to do so by keying into a discourse sufficiently powerful to drag thousands of students onto the streets. Haydar Haydar's novel was duly denounced, branded a defamation and insult to Islam, and hey presto, Al-Azhar students demonstrate and find themselves in violent clashes with the police.
Adel Hussein
Fahmy Howeidy
Mohamed Omara
Safynaz Kazim
Mahmoud Khalil
Yet despite this seeming knee-jerk reaction on the part of the students there is not, Khalil insists, a single, monolithic religious discourse at work. "Each religious group," he says, "depends on observing, explaining and reading reality according to religious and fundamental references, removing from the established text any legal additions that influence those texts over the time."
It is a point over which Adel Hussein, the secretary general of the Labour Party which publishes Al-Shaab, would probably beg to differ. The religious tone adopted on the pages of Al-Shaab is, he argues, always in line with the Islamic principles the party follows. The discourse adopted in the campaign against the novel, he further argues, is both religious and patriotic. And while conceding that the campaign against the novel is a part of his party's policy to disagree with the government, and with its cultural policies in particular, the main thrust of the campaign was to demand that the censor put an end to any violation of religious symbols which means, he asserts, the dismissal of the minister of culture.
"We felt as if it was a test for the Islamic community. If Muslims ignore it, then this could be explained as approval of what the Ministry of Culture publishes, especially in relation to religious symbols".
In Hussein's opinion, the campaign succeeded because it mobilised religious feelings, evidenced by the demonstrations, the responses the party received and the letters sent to the newspaper. Quite whether this constitutes an acknowledgement on Hussein's part that religious sentiments were deliberately mobilised to secure party political goals appears a redundant question to someone who, apparently, sees no division between the two. It is a question, though, over which independent Islamist intellectuals are far less sanguine.
Hussein's description of the use of a religious discourse in this case as successful -- at least in so far as it resulted in a serious government response, ie the summoning for interrogation of those deemed responsible for the publication of Haydar Haydar's novel -- is characterised by Safynaz Kazim, the independent Islamist intellectual and theatre critic, as "stupid," deliberately targeting emotions and focusing on a marginal issue while giving publicity to something most people would have not known about had it not been for Al-Shaab. She believes that religious advocacy has a variety of tones according to the source of the advocacy. And as a critic she found the debate polluted from the outset to a point where it became nonsensical. "Using a naive, impoverished argument the paper targeted emotions and feelings more than logic and reason." There is, she believes, no such thing as a religious discourse, though there is a discourse of believers versus the Western-oriented secular discourse advocated and practised by many intellectuals. Furthermore,
religious advocacy is de facto practiced in our daily life without much theorising so who decides what a religious discourse should be becomes a question with no particular answer. "Every person is entitled to his own argument, so long as it does not accuse the other of being a non-believer, but concentrates rather on deeds," she adds.
Fahmy Howeidy agrees with the general contention that a multiplicity of religious discourses exists. In Egypt, these include Al-Azhar's, that of mosque preachers belonging to the Awqaf, of the political and religious groups working in civil society, and the attempts of independent intellectuals working towards the articulation of effective religious discourses. There are points of convergence, Howeidy says, when it comes to issues related to the basic tenants of Islam, but other than that a religious discourse is nothing more than the point of view of the institution that announces it. "It is this variety which represents a reality where no institution can monopolise a religious discourse or speak on behalf of all Muslims," he insists.
Islamist scholar Mohamed Omara stresses that the specific method of religious argumentation depends on just who is being addressed, pointing out that Ibn Rushd, in his book Fasl Al-Maqal, distinguished between various categories of people according to which method of argumentation was appropriate. '
The exaggerated manner in which issues such as the publication of Haydar's novel are dealt with reflects, Howeidy argues, the suffocation of political life in Egypt. It is a point on which Khalil agrees. That any incident can be blown out of any proportion is, he believes, a symptom of increasing tensions in society. He adds that the government must also bear some responsibility for failing to act quickly and objectively with the event.
"The minister of culture contradicted himself in every statement he issued and the same applies to the chairman of Al-Azhar University and other officials," says Khalil. And as for the Al-Azhar students who demonstrated against the novel and the minister of culture, it is the crisis of the "audio culture generation," a generation that depends on what they hear, not what they read. Khalil doubts not only that the majority of the demonstrators had not read the novel against which they were protesting, but that most of them had not even read Al-Shaab's denunciations. It was just a dangerous example of the sheep mentality.
The tendency for religious discourses to leapfrog the text and search instead for the writer's loyalty to God or religion can only be combated, Howeidy suggests, by opening a channel for free political dialogue that permits the crystallization of a public opinion. And this channel, he believes, will only come about with the freedom to establish parties and organisations that allow society to discuss such matters in the absence of fear. Any crisis in religious discourse is, therefore, inseparable from the crisis afflicting freedom of speech and discussion in Egypt's political life. The religious discourse is at once the most heard and the most boycotted, says Howeidy, and the crises this generates will only abate once that contradiction is squared.
Omara shares Howeidy's belief that religious discourse must be allowed to develop in a more democratic atmosphere, one that permits all religious streams and groups to organise, think and express. In such an atmosphere the discourse automatically becomes calmer, more logical. Without such calm, he says, "the discourse inevitably becomes loaded by feelings of unfairness, disappointment and frustration."
