Religion in Egypt

As I've stated before, Egypt is by far the most religious country I have been to in the Middle East.

In train stations, parks, subways, etc. there are semi-permanent mats for people to stop and pray (which they do at all hours of the day). Many, many people walk around with pocket-sized Qur'ans, chanting softly to themselves, and clearly trying to memorize small bits.

I have found this no where else in the Middle East. It makes Syria look like veritably athiest.

Now, this didn't really surprise me. I knew that Egypt had become significantly more religious in the past thirty years. While it's hard to measure the piety of a society, there are some clues. For example, if you look at pictures of Cairo during the 1950s, virtually none of the women wear headscarves or veils, much less burqas. And statistically, the number of mosques per head was lower than the number of churches per head in the US.

That's because during the 1950s and 1960s, Arab nationalism was all the rage. That was when the current government, the Arab Republic of Egypt, was created, and pan-Arabism, the ideology of Gamal Nasser (A.R. Egypt's first president) was at its height.

This nationalism was distinctly secular. The Ba'athist party, which was pervasive in the Arab world and would eventually take power in Syria and Iraq (think Saddam Hussein), was actually created by an Arab Christain, Michel Aflaq.

And while a very religious Islamic group did exist in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser wasted no time in sending its adherents to concentration camps. Even prominent American scholars predicted that the group would dissipate within a decade, as Arab nationalism and Soviet influence slowly turned Middle Eastern societies secular.

But the 1967 war changed everything. The humiliating defeat of the Arab world by Israel completely discredited the reigning ideology of Arab nationalism. What had gone wrong? How to make it right?

The Muslim Brotherhood, rising from the ashes of Nasser's concentration camps, had a solution. It can be still found in graffitti, one posted right outside this internet cafe: Islam al-huwwa (Islam is the answer). And so over the course of the next three decades, Egyptians came to embrace the idea that they had failed because they had abandoned the Islamic faith for the false idol of nationalism.

Of course, it was not just in Egypt. Across the Middle East, Islam became resurgent as Arab Muslims looked to distinguish themselves from both the US and USSR.

In 1979, Iran became the first Islamic Republic. I'll have to write another post specifically on what people in the Middle East have told me about Iran (including many Iranians I have spoken with in the ME). For now, suffice to say my conversations with Iranians basically confirms what many scholars have argued, that despite its government, Iranians are surprisingly ambivalent towards Islam.

For example, polls show that Iranians show almost exactly the same attitude about the proper relationship between religion and the state as just one other country. Can you name that country?

Answer: the United States.

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But what really surprises me is how religious the Christians are. Coptic Christians make up about 10% of Egypt's population (just short of the percentage of African-Americans in the US).

Copts remind me of the joke about people from Notre Dame University: how can you tell if an Egyptian is Christian? You don't-- they'll tell you.

The Copts wear enormous crucifixes around their necks, and often outside of their shirts. Driving around, they have rosaries hanging from the rearview mirror, and often have little statues of the Virgin Mary glued to the dashboard.

It really can't get much more ostentatious. I went to a very religiously conservative high school in the US, and they would look out of place even there.

The best I can figure is that it is a group reaction to the increased piousness of the Muslims. In a sense, all minority groups feel an impulse to emphasize rather than downplay their differences. This is probably even more true when the majority chooses to emphasize its unique attributes as well.

Other than that, I'm at a loss.